Lena Dunham irritates plenty of people, but the late legendary comedian Joan Rivers was particularly annoyed by her.
According to Last Girl Before Freeway, a new biography of Rivers by Vanity Fair writer Leslie Bennetts to be published later this year, the iconic comedian couldn’t stand Dunham’s lack of effort with her appearance. Bennetts writes in the book, which Heat Street has seen an early copy of: “Having worked so hard at self-improvement all her life, Rivers was particularly incensed by Lena Dunham, whose success was not based on her looks and who didn’t conform to Hollywood’s mandates on female beauty.”
Bennetts continues: “Some hailed Dunham for her bravery, which seemed liked a radical act of subversion in the context of the unforgiving standards that usually prevail on camera. But Rivers’ response was as headline-grabbing as it was punitive.”
It certainly was. Rivers wrote in her 2014 book Diary of a Mad Diva that Dunham was “the first fat girl naked on television,” that she had ushered in a trend for Americans to watch TV with their hands over their eyes, and that if she ever saw Dunham naked again, she wanted “HBO charged with crimes against humanity.”
Rivers added if Dunham is free enough to “have her fat ass” on display why isn’t she “free enough to have a f***ing salad once in a while?”
When Rivers died in September 2014, Dunham was more circumspect, tweeting: “Watching Joan Rivers do standup at age 81 was incredible: athletic, jaw-dropping, terrifying, essential. It never stopped. Neither will she.”
But Dunham did slip in an edgy joke about plastic surgery:
That being said, Joan is gone but a piece of her lives on: her nose, because it’s made of polyurethane.
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) September 4, 2014
