The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation
Page 1
ALSO BY MELISSA RIVERS
Red Carpet Ready: Secrets for Making the Most of Any Moment You’re in the Spotlight
Copyright © 2015 by Melissa Rivers
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Random House LLC,
New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rivers, Melissa, 1969–
The book of Joan : tales of mirth, mischief, and manipulation / Melissa Rivers.—First edition.
1. Rivers, Joan. 2. Comedians—United States—Biography. 3. Entertainers—United States—Biography. 4. Rivers, Melissa, 1969–5. Television producers and directors—United States—Biography. 6. Mothers and daughters—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.R55R58 2015
792.7602′80922—dc23
[B]
2015006127
ISBN 978-1-101-90382-7
eBook ISBN 978-1-101-90383-4
Book design by Elizabeth Rendfleisch
Map by Meredith Hamilton
Jacket photograph: Courtesy of the author
First Edition
v3.1
For my Mother,
whom I think about every day,
and for my Father,
who, as of this past September,
is no longer resting in peace
Contents
Cover
Also by the author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Borrowed Time
She Works Hard for the Money
The Need to Succeed
Fly Me to the Moan
Sex, Lies, and Videotape
Death Be Not Loud
“Here’s Johnny … !”
Truth Be Told
Movin’ on Up!
Can I Take Your Order, Please?
A Sport by Any Other Name
Fs and Us, Ps and Qs
The Gift of the Grab
Readin’, Ritin’, and ’Rithmetic
Some Things Never Change
Brains vs. Boobs
Better Living Through Candy
Boy Meets Girl (or Whatever)
Everybody’s Talking … About Everybody Else
“I Want to Live Forever …”
Just Say “Yes”
Speedy Gonzalez
A House Divided
Mirror, Mirror
Photo Insert
Bogey & Bacall
Lock Up Your Virgins
The Purse
Dr. Frankenstein and the Red Carpet Monster
The Red Carpet Means You’ve Made It!
Know When to Fold ’Em
Swag the Dog
Something in the Oven
Too Soon?
I Love You … or Not
The Loo of Love
From Here to Maternity
Begin the BAGuine
Do Your Duty(-Free Shopping)
A Dingo Stole My Baby
Murder and Mayhem
Parenting a Parent
Not Under My Roof
Forty Is the New Fifty
Pillow Talk
I’ve Got a Secret
Customer Disservice
Fifty Shades of Cray
Ivy Day
Speaking of My Mother …
The End
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Melissa, Helen Keller once said,
‘Life is a great adventure, or it’s nothing.’ …
Of course, she said it to a coffee table … but still,
you get the point.”
Borrowed Time
I never thought I’d be sitting in a hospital making a decision about turning off a ventilator. I guess in my head I knew it was a possibility, as we all know we may face that kind of decision for a loved one someday. I just didn’t know I’d have to make it so unexpectedly. Just last night my mother and I were on the phone, laughing and joking about an old friend she’d run into. It was a typical, checking-in-with-each-other kind of call. I had no way of knowing that it would be our last conversation.
What I wanted was for her to sit up and say, “Ooh, that was a nice nap. What time is hair and makeup?” What I needed was five minutes so I could tell her all the crazy, hilarious things that had gone on around her for the last week. We were probably the only two people in Mount Sinai who would’ve seen the humor in all this madness. But since I didn’t get those five minutes …
In our family we always laughed our way through pain, so I decided to write a book that would have made her laugh. At least once a day she used to turn to me and say, “Can you believe this shit?” And I’d say, “Yes, Mommy, I can.”
Mommy, I hope you’re somewhere reading—and, God knows, editing—this book, but the thing I hope most of all is that you’re smiling.
She Works Hard for the Money
One of the questions I’m most often asked is “Did your mother always work so hard?” I wish I had an answer. According to her cousin Alan—the only relative worth speaking to or acknowledging—“Your mother was like this before you were born. She wanted to be sure she was one step ahead of everybody else. It used to make your grandmother crazy. We’d sit down to play a game of Monopoly, and by the time we were once around the board, she’d co-op’d three hotels and was trying to foreclose on one of our cousin Charlotte’s properties. I think this is one of the reasons I finally settled in Vermont. The family gatherings were way too intense for me.”
My mother was a comedian, actress, writer, producer, jewelry monger, tchotchke maker, spokesperson, hand model, Celebrity Apprentice winner, and self-appointed somewhat-goodwill ambassador to twenty-seven Third World countries that were unaware they had a goodwill ambassador. (It was a power move on her part, not unlike the time she named herself “block captain” of her block in New York, which had no block association. (I think this was a nod to the Eisenhower years—which I never fully understood—when many suburban neighborhoods had block captains who were in charge of getting people into the local bomb shelters during nuclear attacks.) The woman was indefatigable. James Brown may have been the hardest-working man in show business, but I’m pretty sure my mother was the hardest-working woman. Even at eighty years old, she was on the go, from gig to gig, show to show, all the time. She was always working, always moving; she was like Sisyphus with jokes. A typical week for her last year was:
Monday—Start working on weekly episode of Fashion Police in the morning and during the day. Drive down to Philadelphia for the QVC show (and work on her new book or a TV or movie script in the car on the way down).
Tuesday—More work on Fashion Police and meet with her various agents, biz people, jewelry designers, etc. Nighttime performance at the West Bank Café in New York City.
Wednesday—Early morning flight to Los Angeles for Fashion Police meetings all day and night.
Thursday—Arrive at E! studios at 5:00 a.m. to prepare for Fashion Police taping at 8:00 a.m. Afterward, press obligations and business meetings. A quick dinner of Chinese food with Cooper before catching the red-eye back to New York City.
Friday—Travel to whatever city she was appearing in that night and then give a ninety-minute performance.
Saturday—Travel to whatever city she was appearing in that night, do another ninety-minute show, then travel back
to New York.
Sunday—Not unlike for God, a day of rest—and by rest, I mean, reading scripts, writing a book, doing the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in ink,1 and maybe, just maybe, catching the matinee of a Broadway show with her BFF, Margie Stern, and then immediately afterward calling her agent to find out if she could take over the lead in whatever show she had just seen. (I swear I once overheard her screaming at her agent, “I’d be a fabulous Willy Loman!”)2
Just writing that tires me out.
I remember a conversation we had after one of our Very Long Thursdays—we’d shot an episode of Fashion Police, and then taped scenes for Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best, and at night we did four interviews for In Bed with Joan. At the end of the night, after the camera crew and production team had finally left, I went downstairs to her bedroom. She was lying in bed in her bathrobe, and I started telling her that she needed to slow down. I told her that it wasn’t healthy—physically, mentally, or emotionally, especially at her age—to keep working these hours. I told her that I was worried about her and Cooper was worried about her, too. I was pouring my heart out, thinking I was getting somewhere, as she hadn’t interrupted me. I looked over and saw that her eyes were shut. I thought that she had fallen asleep and hadn’t heard a word I’d said. So I nudged her and said, “Mom?” She shushed me and said, “Melissa, please! I’m practicing visualization techniques and I’m seeing myself as the face of Depends.”
1 FYI, she was a terrible speller, but no matter how many spaces were allowed, she made the letters fit. No puzzle went unfinished. When I would point out that there was a mistake, she’d say, “Don’t bother me with the details. It works for me.” (I actually put a book of crossword puzzles, a pair of her glasses, and her favorite pens in her casket. Somewhere in heaven there’s a small blonde woman misspelling a four-letter word for “Asian housemaid.”3)
2 And that was a light week. She still found plenty of quality and quantity time to criticize me.
3 The correct answer is “Amah.” She’s probably trying to shove in “Cashundertable.”
The Need to Succeed
I don’t know, or pretend to know, what happens to us after we die. Nobody really does, except the dead, and they’re not talking. (At least not to me, but I have AT&T; I can barely get living people on the phone.) I also don’t know if there’s a heaven or hell (although I have been to Winnipeg in winter) or an afterlife. But what I do know is that if there is an afterlife, my mother is coming back as a pack animal. It’s the only other one of God’s creatures that was born and raised to work as hard as she did. The thing is, though, she never thought of it as work, because once she knew what she wanted to do, there was no stopping her.
I think both nature and nurture had a role to play in my mother’s tireless and never-ending work ethic. Her parents were both Russian immigrants who were uprooted from their countries and came to the United States with nothing. I believe the immigrant mentality of working hard to get ahead was taught to my mother and her sister, my aunt Barbara, by their parents. So when my mother became a parent, there was no question she was going to be a working mother—and she became one long before it was fashionable or, as times have changed, necessary. Although, truth be told, she considered work a necessity, like water, air, food, and bespoke living room furniture.
She didn’t have to get a job; my father always made a good salary, and we could have been more than comfortable on his income. So, during my childhood, my mother’s drive was not all about money (although we certainly lived well), and it also wasn’t about fame. One of her last national television interviews was on The Tavis Smiley Show, on July 13 and 14, 2014. Tavis asked her why she worked so hard at comedy, and she said it wasn’t a choice. She told him that comedy was her calling. She said, “That’s why comics are here. We were put on earth to make people laugh.” Whether that’s true, I don’t know—I didn’t take philosophy, theology, or astronomy in college—but I believe she thought it was true, which would explain why she took a very hard-earned and expensive degree from Barnard College in English literature and put it on a shelf in order to tell jokes to drunks at Shriners conventions.
To be totally honest, she didn’t go into comedy right away. After she graduated she tried to do the “expected” thing and got a job working at the world-famous Bond Clothes in Manhattan. Her work ethic was in evidence even then, as she worked a million hours a week, doing everything and anything she was asked. Her diligence eventually paid off: she wound up marrying the boss’s son, Jimmy Sanger. Her goal had been to work hard and get ahead, not get a husband, but that’s what happened. Okay, truth be told, it wasn’t exactly a marriage made in heaven; it was more like a marriage made in the stock room. The way the story goes—and I can’t swear it’s true; I wasn’t there; but according to relatives who were—right after she and Jimmy took their vows and said their “I dos,” my mother was standing on the receiving line and said to her cousin Alan (you remember, the one from Vermont), “Can you believe I’m doing this?” I don’t know if Alan did, but she certainly didn’t. Six months later she ended her marriage to Jimmy and quit her paying job at Bond.
Then she did something else nobody could believe: she went into show business. But the one thing everyone did believe was that she was going to work very hard at it.
Fly Me to the Moan
My mother was in show business for fifty years and she must’ve spent at least thirty of them traveling. She spent more time on the road than Jack Kerouac, Willie Nelson, and Aileen Wuornos combined. She had to have earned enough frequent flyer points to get 80 percent of Mia Farrow’s kids first-class, round-trip tickets to Jupiter (Jupiter the planet, not Jupiter, Florida, home to the legendary Burt Reynolds dinner theater that I believe the legendary Burt Reynolds recently lost to a legendary bankruptcy court judge).
Our family was very fortunate that when we flew, we usually went first class. Anyone who tells you there’s no difference between first class and coach has either never flown first class or never flown coach. For starters, in first class, while there may be the occasional whining child, there’s also at least a one-in-four chance there’ll be a whining celebrity, and the celebrity won’t be whining because they’re colicky or their ears hurt or they’re bored. They’ll be whining because they’ve had a bad reaction to their vodka and crystal meth. They’ll be sweating profusely and grinding their capped teeth into tiny ivory pegs and not understanding why one of the flight attendants won’t fuck them in the bathroom.
My mother loved airplane food, so to her, first class was a five-star restaurant. She would eat her whole meal as well as mine, and anyone else’s in our group. She then would ask for leftovers for her dogs. On flights with strung-out rock stars on board, leftovers were aplenty, because the stars were so busy grinding their teeth that they couldn’t unhinge their jaws to put food in their mouths. My mother travelled so much that her habits became legendary—so legendary, in fact, that when I took the American Airlines red-eye from Los Angeles to New York, the flight attendants would hand me a bag of leftovers to bring to her for her dogs. I know what you’re thinking: how charming. Yes. And her dogs weighed fourteen hundred pounds.
My mother always encouraged me to fly first class, even when I didn’t have a first-class ticket (and by “encouraged,” I mean “manipulated”). “Melissa, if you want to bump up to first class, don’t hesitate to play the widow card.” When I’d point out that I wasn’t a widow, she’d tell me, “Then get a quickie marriage and kill him in his sleep. If you’re on a six-hour New York–to–LA flight, it’s worth a coupla years’ probation to have fresh coffee, extra legroom, and warm nuts. Also, you can’t steal silverware from the coach lounge because there is no coach lounge. The coach lounge is called the terminal, and it’s called ‘terminal’ for a reason.”
She also suggested that if I was “uncomfortable” playing the widow card because I wasn’t actually a widow, then I should do what she did and join the Mile-High Club. Needless to say, I
was appalled. My mother said, “Melissa, don’t judge. Let me tell you something. Orville was much better than Wilbur, although Wilbur was quite the cuddler. Didn’t you wonder how we flew all over the world all those years for free? I don’t know why you’re so upset; it didn’t bother your father.”
One of the few things my mother loved more than the first-class food on American Airlines flights was the chocolates in the American Airlines first-class lounge. She would take so many that they eventually started giving her a box every other week. All over her perfect Marie Antoinette–like apartment were little individually wrapped chocolates with “AA” labels on the wrapper. Strangers must have thought she was hosting daily meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.
When I was little, I often went on the road with my parents, especially in the days before my mom had a regular television series. She was touring all the time, playing clubs and theaters all over the world. For me, many of those crucial formative years that make you the person you are were spent at thirty thousand feet, waiting for air traffic control to clear a runway. I was taught early on, before the age of seven, how to behave on a plane. Here are some simple, fun rules my parents gave me for plane travel:
1. Don’t smoke.
2. Don’t drink.
3. Don’t kick the seat of the person in front of you (unless that person is smoking or drinking).
4. Don’t whine, even if the plane is going down. If you’re hurtling to your death at five hundred miles an hour, no one wants to hear that you didn’t like the food.
5. Don’t open the window and stick your head outside like a dog in a car on a freeway. This should be obvious, because if you open the window on a plane, two things will happen: (1) your head will be ripped off your body, and (2) the entire plane will decompress and drop like a rock. These events, however, will give you a chance to implement rule number four, Don’t whine—which, FYI, you won’t be able to do anyway, because your head’s been ripped off.