Diary of a Mad Diva

by Joan Rivers

  I always pick up after my dogs. Well, actually I, Joan Rivers, diva-philanthropist of a sort, amazingly sexual for her age, don’t pick up my dog’s poo. I have my staff do it. In this case it’s Pingpong’s second cousin, Kabuki, who’s here on a temporary visa or maybe it’s an amnesty application having something to do with ivory hunting or sex trafficking. I don’t know; after seeing Downton Abbey I make it my business not to get into backstairs gossip.

  Kabuki is a lovely young Pygmy man. He has to jump up in order to hand me my mail, but I find him totally trustworthy. Not once in all the time he’s been scooping the poop has he ever brought one of my dogs to a Korean restaurant and “accidentally” left him in the kitchen.

  AUGUST 18

  Dear Diary:

  Back in L.A. Everyone is just starting to calm down. There was an earthquake here last night. Very scary! Everything started to shake. Only two people were happy about the quake: Michael J. Fox, as it was the first time in years he walked straight; and me. Now that my vagina has dropped so low, I just suctioned it to the floor of my bedroom and was perfectly safe. Never thought I would say this, but hooray for age.

  AUGUST 19

  Dear Diary:

  Performed at a women’s show and it went surprisingly well. Lena Dunham spoke about how difficult it is to be a woman in our business and claims she, and she alone, has broken through for women. In the audience Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Mary Tyler Moore and Sarah Jessica Parker all started to cry because according to that fatso, they didn’t count. I do want to give her credit however—Lena was the first fat girl naked on television and she changed the way America looks at their TV sets. They now do it with their hands over their eyes.

  AUGUST 20

  Dear Diary:

  I have to send a gift to the Royal Family. I totally missed Prince William and Princess Kate’s son George’s birthday. Little Georgie has William’s full lips and Kate’s sparkling eyes. I hope he doesn’t have Diana’s sense of direction. It’s very hard to buy a gift for the future king of England. What do you get someone who already owns Scotland? I went into a store to buy him a set of blocks and they said, “He’s already got Trafalgar Square and Regent Street.”

  Our royal family—the Obamas, not the Kardashians—welcomed a new addition into their family, too. No, Sasha’s not pregnant—but wouldn’t it be fabulous if she were? She could be the first Baby Mama on Obama-care. President Obama has gotten a new dog. I could tell right away he was Obama’s dog: he was cute and black, and when he barked, no foreigners listened.

  AUGUST 21

  Dear Diary:

  Just got to San Francisco for a concert. Should be fun, it’ll be my crowd: fifteen thousand gay guys and the fat gal pals they dance with.

  San Francisco is still the gayest city in the country, hands down—or bottoms up, depending on who took the poppers! This city is so gay that at the bar in my hotel the specialty drink is the AIDS cocktail.

  AUGUST 22

  Dear Diary:

  Oy. On the way to my show tonight we got stuck on a bridge behind a car with handicap plates.

  What is the driver’s handicap? Does he have only one leg and therefore can’t brake? Or tiny little dwarf hands and can’t turn the wheel? Maybe he’s got Tourette’s and every time he—shitfuck, shitfuck, shitfuck—twitches, the car keeps switching lanes? Does he have to stop and scratch while going seventy miles per hour because he has the heartbreak of psoriasis? Is he deaf? Because I remember when driving with Helen Keller the guy driving behind us kept honking his horn. He figured out it was a complete waste of time when he hit the ditch.

  I think handicap plates should be more specific. Right now all they have is a drawing of a wheelchair. I think if the driver is blind, the plate should have a picture of Stevie Wonder; and if he’s retarded, a picture of Sarah Palin; and if it’s an underage driver, a picture of R. Kelly with a line through it.

  I was getting agitated when I noticed the driver also had a bumper sticker that read, “I’d rather be fishing.” So I hit him in the rear and knocked him off the bridge into the water. I got to my gig in Sausalito and he got a guppy on his way to God. Win-win!

  AUGUST 23

  Dear Diary:

  My concert went really well; God bless the San Fran homos! If she’s still alive, I’ll bet Anita Bryant is sorry she dissed them. At the end of the show, all fifteen thousand party bottoms stood up and gave me a farting ovation.

  AUGUST 25

  Dear Diary:

  I may be changing agents even though I love Suave Steve Levine. I think of agents the way I think of a pair of old Spanx: (1) They’re not as bright as when you first got them; (2) they sure don’t support you the way they did in the beginning; and (3) after a couple of months they really start to smell. I think the real reason I’m leaving is because I hate my agent’s new assistant, Helmut. He’s a little snot that prides himself on his candor and frankness. Honestly, I don’t want candor and frankness from a twelve-year-old with rich parents and hair gel. I don’t need, right before I go on, him whispering in my ear, “Fingers crossed you still remember your act, Miss Rivers,” or, “Know why I like you? You make my nana look hot!” I want someone who will be kissing my ass so much they’ll have to travel with a suitcase filled with Blistex. Never mind a good-looking kid from a rich family; I want a delusional adult with low self-esteem and people-pleasing issues. I want to hear, “Oh, Miss Rivers, you are so much more beautiful and thin in person!” rather than, “Gee, even in clothes your body looks like it’s melting.”

  AUGUST 26

  Dear Diary:

  Chilling at Melissa’s house after spending all day tending to business. While watching Congress on C-SPAN tonight, I had a revelation. (I don’t normally watch C-SPAN but my remote froze while I was changing channels trying to find Animal Horror Stories and Pets Who Kill.) The revelation is this: When a member of Congress refers to another member as “my distinguished colleague,” what he means is “that dim-witted asshole,” and when he says “with all due respect,” he means, “fuck you and the lobbyist you rode in on.” I love America.

  AUGUST 27

  Dear Diary:

  I took Cooper to SeaWorld in San Diego today. We went swimming with the dolphins. I love dolphins. They’re smart and they’re beautiful, but what nobody talks about is that they shit in the water. As Elie Wiesel likes to say, “Never again.”

  AUGUST 28

  Dear Diary:

  The Elie Wiesel quote got me thinking. As Hitler’s niece, Bertha von Schnitzel, once told me, “It’s very hard to cheer up Holocaust victims. Joan, no matter how many times I’m in their company and no matter how hard I try, I just can’t put a positive spin on their experiences. What can you say?” And she’s right, what can you say to Buchenwald Betty and Auschwitz Arnie?

  “Hey, could be worse. At least you got three hots and a cot!”

  “Look how easy it was to keep your weight down! I’ll bet not one person in the camps ever came up to you and said, ‘Ruthie, you look a little hippy. Lay off the dirt soup.’”

  “Don’t be a whiner—you can finally pull off horizontal stripes!”

  “So they put you on a train in the middle of the night and moved you out of your house. What’s so bad? No one likes to summer where they winter!”

  AUGUST 29

  Dear Diary:

  Went to a big Hollywood party tonight and guess who snubbed me? Gayle King. That’s right, Gayle King. With all due respect, I spent all night chatting with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, but Gayle King ignored me??? Maybe she’s mad at me because I’m always making jokes about her friendship with Oprah, or maybe it’s because when I saw her at the party I said, “Gayle, I love your chunky silver bracelet. Are you wearing a matching cock ring?” Whatever. I still consider her a distinguished colleague.

  AUGUST 30

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nbsp; Dear Diary:

  I took Cooper to the Dodgers’ game tonight. He had a great time. The Dodgers’ pitcher was a Korean rookie named Hyun-Jin Ryu, so the stands were packed with Korean fans. I felt like an extra on The Bridge on the River Kwai.* The Dodgers won and Ryu was terrific. The only bad thing was when we went to the food court, the famous Dodger Dogs still had their tails.

  AUGUST 31

  Dear Diary:

  I’m on the plane flying home. It’s the last day of August, which means it’s safe to be in New York because all the shrinks are back from the Hamptons and the crazies are back in therapy. But just my luck, I’m seated next to Gary Busey and Charlie Sheen. I’m praying the movie is All Is Lost.

  Four fab supermodels. Or as I think of them, one hundred pounds of fun!

  SEPTEMBER 1

  Dear Diary:

  Today starts Pilot Season, which is the busiest time of year for actors, flight attendants and anyone else who wants to do a pilot. I’ll be heading to L.A. in a few days because that’s where most of the pilots are shot (except for the ones leaving airports in Afghanistan). I don’t usually go up for roles these days (I used to go down for them but you can see where that got me—doing one-nighters in Milwaukee for old Shriners and their nurses). I’m in a very bad place in my career for pilot casting. On one end, that old has-been Judi Dench gets offered all the feisty-tough-talking-adorable-wise-been-though-it-all granny roles, and on the other end of the spectrum, that young whore Diane Keaton gets offered all the if-you-squint-and-keep-the-lights-low-I still-look-good-enough-to-have-one-fuck-left-in-me mother roles.

  My old agent, Steve Levine, always said that I should be more interested in getting shows produced than being in them. “Joan,” he’d say, “producing will bring you passive income.” I’d say, “Steve, you sound like a lazy prostitute.” He’d answer, “Joan, look at the bright side—you don’t have to ‘do lunch’ with the johns. You just have to ‘do’ them.” So just as soon as my stitches heal (I had a small procedure yesterday; I had my left ass cheek removed from my ankle), I’m going to put on my thinking cap and come up with some show ideas to pitch to the network.

  SEPTEMBER 2

  Dear Diary:

  Today’s Labor Day, the day we honor Kate Gosselin, the Octomom and any other woman who’s spent more time in hard labor than a mouthy prisoner at Leavenworth.

  Labor Day has always been very close to my heart because I get to honor those wonderful adult workers in Thailand who make a dollar a week cutting, buffing and polishing the jewelry I sell on QVC, jewelry that they themselves could never hope to afford. But what I like most about Labor Day is that it’s the day of the year when sloppy men and fat women are no longer allowed to wear white, which allows the rest of us nicely appointed, well-groomed citizens never to have to vomit in our mouths again.

  I believe the “No White After Labor Day” rule was created by rich people who like to get away from the city and go to their summer compounds where they’d wear light-colored clothing so they wouldn’t sweat under the hot sun on their yachts. Or, Paula Deen created it, in a wild overreaction to the scandal involving the N-word.

  I did a little research and discovered that the Labor Day holiday was created in 1894 by Peter J. McGuire, who was a member of the Brotherhood of Carpenters. (He’s not to be confused with Karen Carpenter of the Carpenters, who founded the Let’s Starve Ourselves to Death holiday in 1983.) Everyone thinks Peter was a staunch union organizer who believed in the greater good and created this holiday to honor the brave efforts of the workers who were standing up for their rights against The Man. The truth is he just wanted a day off to drink and bang the little chippie he kept in a walk-up near Union Square without his wife knowing.

  I’m heading off to a party in the Hamptons, which I love. I always feel better about myself coming home when I have really nice silverware in my purse.

  SEPTEMBER 3

  Dear Diary:

  Just got on the plane to head to L.A. Had a great time in the Hamptons, BBQ-ing with people I loathe. The Hamptons are like Heidi Klum’s vagina—a place where lots of diverse rich people go for fun, but Jews are not really welcome.

  The Hamptons are also filled with second wives who are very easy to spot; just check out their rings. First wives’ rings are always little bitty chips; the second wives have rings the size of NeNe Leakes’s ass.

  The guy sitting next to me on the plane started getting all chatty, but I cut that off right away. He started waxing on about lawn care so I pulled out my private collection of Yoko Ono CDs and said, “Wanna listen?” He put on a sleep mask and headphones and stuffed a sock in his mouth. And I couldn’t blame him; even John Lennon, when he heard Yoko’s first CD, said, “Yoko, oh no!” Should be a pleasant flight.

  SEPTEMBER 4

  Dear Diary:

  Had twenty-five minutes between Fashion Police and Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best? tapings, so I headed over to the plastic surgeon’s office for a quickie. I’ve had so many procedures done I’ve spent more time in surgery than the doctors on Grey’s Anatomy. I’ve been pulled so tight that the last time my doctor asked for a urine sample I just cried into a bottle. I’ve been pulled tighter than Mary-Kate Olsen’s belt. Yes, I admit it; I’ve been given more lifts than Aileen Wuornos. It’s reached the point where I’ve paid Dr. Wrinkle so much money that when his son made his college valedictory speech he thanked me for making it all possible.

  SEPTEMBER 5

  Dear Diary:

  Spent most of the day at the pool, lying on a chaise lounge, in a bathrobe, with cucumbers on my eyes. Not to help heal the stitches; I was being t-bagged by Melissa’s greengrocer. That’s one of the differences between New York and L.A. In New York when you order “fresh vegetables,” “fresh” means they’re two days away from being part of a landfill on Staten Island.* In L.A., “fresh” means that the cleaning lady’s husband’s third cousin, Jacinto, who sleeps on a mat in their garage, is down the road picking them as we speak, and they’ll be washed, cut and in my salad shooter before you can say “border patrol.”

  Speaking of vegetables, I hate it when people refer to paraplegics as “vegetables.” The lack of specificity drives me crazy. What kind of vegetables? Tubers? Yams? Beetroots? It’s not accurate to call Drooling Dave or Catatonic Cathy vegetables. Vegetables are growing organisms; Dave and Cathy are end tables.

  SEPTEMBER 6

  Dear Diary:

  Cooper starts school this week and he’s at that age where he’s going to start thinking about dating. I don’t know if Melissa has had the birds-and-the-bees talk with him yet, but I hope she included surrogates, Petri dishes and turkey basters in the conversation.

  In my day it was so much easier. When I was a kid, getting to second base meant the girl let the boy feel her up. Nowadays it means she slept with half the Yankees’ infield. All my mother ever told me about the facts of life was, “Joan, sex is easy. The man gets on top, the woman gets on the bottom.” I bought bunk beds. I literally knew nothing. On my wedding night, I’d never seen a naked man before. When my husband, Edgar, came out of the bathroom, I hung my blouse on him. And I think those days were better. As I said to Melissa, “Your generation just bangs anything; it’s wrong. Sex should be a beautiful thing that a woman shares only with the man she loves or, if he’s out of town, her husband.”

  I worry that kids today are having sex so much earlier. It used to be that if you were a slut you’d be ashamed. Now girls put it on a resume.

  And by the way, I hate the terms “baby daddy” and “baby mama.” A baby daddy is just a horndog who was too cheap to buy a condom and a baby mama is the local slut who got knocked up in the back of a truck. You shouldn’t be a baby anything if you’re still wearing pull-ups yourself.

  SEPTEMBER 7

  Dear Diary:

  Turns out it’s not just kids who are getting whorier—older people are getting skanky, too
. I was just at the mall (I don’t shop in malls, I just like to sit in front of Abercrombie & Fitch stores and say to fat people who are thinking of going in, “Keep moving, Tubby, not for you. You need a sarong, just to go to Bed Bath & Beyond”), when I saw a woman walking through the food court wearing a T-shirt that said, “Blow jobs are the new black.” I was horrified. “Meryl,” I said, “Have some dignity. You’re a star. Be a fucking lady.”

  SEPTEMBER 8

  Dear Diary:

  Back to New York for Fashion Week for Fashion Police and I’m a little depressed. There seem to be no rules anymore. I always believed in “no white ’til Memorial Day,” but then you see a picture of the Pope. “Black is thinning,” then you see a whale. And the rule “Don’t overdress for church,” and then Mother Teresa would show up for prayer meetings in a leper-skin jacket.

  There’s nothing quite like Fashion Week: hundreds of emaciated runway models staggering around, hoping they have the strength to live and pose another day. It’s like Schindler’s List with better clothes.

  Fashion Week is a little bit of heaven: gorgeous clothes, great accessories and thousands and thousands and thousands of gay men . . . Normally if you want to see that many gay men in one place you have to look inside George Michael’s mouth.

  SEPTEMBER 9

  Dear Diary:

  Going to the Fashion Week Gala tonight. Can’t wait. It will be all the beautiful people. And Mayim Bialik. I love going to the gala and people watching. My favorite thing to do is play a game I call “Make Anna Wintour Smile.” The way it goes is, I sneak up to her table on all fours and tap her on the shoulder and say, “Psst, Anna . . . ,” and then I show her pictures of bus plunges, sick puppies and orphans. Last year I actually got her to giggle when I showed her a video of a military funeral.

  Another fun thing is taking bets on which cater waiter will snap first. All night long these poor boys walk around with full trays, getting more and more frustrated as the evening wears on because nobody will eat anything. Their arms get so tired ’cause the trays are getting heavier and heavier, and they start getting all pissy and snarky, and begin saying things to the models like, “Care for a grape, or will it make you look fat?” or “How about half a carrot? You can purge that up in no time flat,” or, “Hey, Skeletora, why don’t you have a parsley sprig? It’ll help wash the vomit from your breath.”