A Friend Called to Say Joan Rivers Had Just Walked Into His Restaurant.
She Drove Straight Over and Asked Her for Nothing At All.

The Heather McMahan Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"I got a really good feeling about you. You've got chutzpah. You listened to my advice. You went for it. You're going to make it."

- Joan Rivers, as recounted by Heather McMahan

She Didn't Want a Photo. She Just Wanted Joan to Know She'd Listened.

Heather was bartending in Manhattan and going to every Joan Rivers show she could find. She describes the arrangement without flattering herself: "I basically was her stalker." The first photo of the two of them was taken outside a basement club across the street from the restaurant where Heather worked - she knew the building, so she knew which back door Joan would have to use. She waited there and told her she was the reason she did comedy. Joan's first words back were "Oh, my God, you're gorgeous." It was Fat Tuesday. Joan gave her Mardi Gras beads and ten minutes she did not owe her.

Over the years the encounters added up into something Heather calls a blessing in the business, and the advice was always the same: get out of New York. "You have a very commercial look. I think you need to go to L.A." So she went. Her first twenty-four hours there produced a car accident and a spray tan that gave her an allergic reaction, which she read as the universe telling her she should have stayed put.

Less than two weeks in, a friend who had bartended with her in New York called from a restaurant in Beverly Hills: Joan just walked in, get your ass here. She drove over in an old two-seater, ordered a spritz at the bar, and went to the table. The assistant offered to take a picture. She turned it down. "I don't want to bother Ms. Rivers. I just want to tell her that I took her advice and I decided to move to LA."

Joan asked where she was doing comedy and what she was doing for money. A gym, Heather said, because that's where the producers are. "Brilliant, brilliant. Good for you." Then she went back to the bar. On her way out, Joan stopped and asked the room where the blonde girl went.

She held it together until the valet, then called her father from the car and dry-heaved down the phone: "Dad, she said I'm doing well." Joan died nine months later. Heather is clear-eyed that this was the whole relationship - a woman on the periphery, always an arm's length away, who kept saying keep going. "She was my comedy godmother from a distance."

▶ Watch on YouTube: The restaurant in Beverly Hills, and Joan's blessing - ~6:45

She Dropped Business Cards Into Strangers' Gym Bags at SoulCycle.

The gym was a strategy, not a job. She worked the SoulCycle in West Hollywood on the theory that the most reliable thing about Los Angeles decision-makers is vanity, so they would all eventually turn up in a spin class. She made herself useful - if you wanted off the waitlist, you needed her cell number - and she printed cards on Vistaprint reading writer, producer, comedian, actress, with a headshot and a bad spray tan. Then she slipped them into people's bags.

Whitney Cummings is a friend now. At the time she got about thirty cards and never saw one. "Heather, I'm so ADD. I never looked at the bottom of the bag." Heather's reply: "I just kind of thought you were a bitch and weren't going to respond."

She worked every hospitality job there is and says she found real joy in all of them, partly because they were material. What she cannot tolerate in other people is hesitation. Asked for her biggest pet peeve, the answer was immediate: wasted potential. A hairstylist once told her that Heather had asked whether she modeled, heard no, and said flatly, "Oh, what a waste" - and that the remark is why she models now.

She has paid for all three specials herself, which she knew was a serious risk and talks about openly because she thinks hiding it fails the people coming up behind her. The payoff arrived while she was three hours deep in the wine cellar of her favorite restaurant in Florence, with no cell service. She surfaced to twenty missed calls from her agents and manager and assumed the worst. "Where are you? We thought you died." Then: Netflix wants your special. The other break came the same way, with her out of range - Maria Shriver told the Today Show hosts they had to book this Heather McMahan girl, and the producers started calling while Heather was on a wellness retreat in the woods in Malibu, convinced she was being pranked. She was in New York the next morning.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Dropping business cards and hustling - ~9:25

Her Father Mailed Her Sorority a List of Reasons to Quit Theater.

Her father was Kyle, and she is named Heather Kyle after him. He sent a letter to her sorority house at Ole Miss titled the top ten reasons she should give up theater and join the Air Force. Reason one: you look great in the uniform. They read it aloud at a chapter meeting like a roast. He also liked to put a hand on her shoulder and tell her, "God, you really missed your calling to be in the NFL" - which is why she named her first special Son I Never Had.

David asked whether that kind of brutal honesty landed as an insult. It did not. "He really believes in me." The McMahan dinner table was savage by design - bring your best material or lose - and she credits it with making her unkillable in rooms where producers and critics say worse. His doubt, when it came, was fear rather than disbelief. He would call her in Los Angeles asking when she was going to give it up, and in the same breath tell her, "I wish I had the balls to go do what you want to do."

He was misdiagnosed with diabetes and put on medication. It was pancreatic cancer. From diagnosis to death was seven days. Heather was at her best friend's wedding in Puerto Rico when she told her husband flatly that her father was dying of cancer, before anyone had said so. She networks, so she called every sorority sister with a connection to MD Anderson and had him in Texas two days later. He was fifty-seven.

He stayed lucid to the end, which the ICU nurses told the family they had never seen. She sat holding his hand through the beeping, and what he said was: "Never give up on your dreams. You're a dreamer. Go for it. You are so brave."

One Christmas, having watched an interview where Jim Carrey discusses writing himself a check he intended to cash one day, she wrote her father a check for a million dollars and framed it, because he had covered her rent that first year out of college. He died two Christmases later. She reckons she was good for that check about two years after that. The six months after his death were dark enough that she moved home to Atlanta and assumed Los Angeles was finished with her. Instead she got on Instagram with a glass of wine and asked who else was grieving a dead dad - and the answers came in by the thousand.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Seven days, when dad got his diagnosis - ~17:47

The Ryder Cup Got Her Fired. Joan Would Have Said Go Harder.

She was hired as the first-tee host at the Ryder Cup - five in the morning, a crowd of mostly men who had been drinking since the night before, a microphone, and no television cameras. She was, in her words, a glorified court jester with very little direction, and she concedes that getting clarity on the job was hers to do. A section of the crowd started a chant aimed at Rory McIlroy. She repeated it into the mic, read it as a Long Island endearment, and was scolded and then fired. What followed was an international pile-on, including grown men in her DMs proposing they meet outside a gas station. She apologized immediately. What stung was never the reviews. "I don't care if you don't like my comedy, but what really hurts is if you make a judgment on my character." Her read on Joan's advice is not in doubt: she would have said go harder. The new special opens by doing roughly that.

She reads Joan's book Bouncing Back every year, "because every year's hard," and found her own copy while recovering from a small surgery. The coincidence that stopped her cold was elsewhere in the book. After her father died she had begged him for a sign - he was a Georgia Tech man, a Yellow Jackets fan - and then she got stung by a yellow jacket in Florida, and again a week later, and found a bee sitting on her purse as she walked into the Lexington Opera House to scout her first self-financed special.

When life is hard and you feel like you can't fly, be that bee. Heather threw the book across the room. Two people who made her, and both of them come back as the same insect. She collects Joan's bee brooches now, and at auction last year she won one of her stage gowns, which is at the framer's.

David's last ask was to finish a sentence: I knew I could actually do this when. She didn't reach for a credit. She went back to being sixteen, doing stand-up at her own prom, in front of the most unforgiving audience there is. She made them laugh and walked off with what she calls the largest body high she can explain. "This is a drug I'm going to have to chase forever."

▶ Watch on YouTube: The Ryder Cup controversy - ~46:28

"I'm Heather McMahan, and the person who believed in me was Joan Rivers."