The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation

by Melissa Rivers

  I’ve been told that Johnny held me in his arms during an entire script meeting before giving me back to the nanny, who returned me to my parents. Everybody had a good laugh but me; I was too busy developing abandonment issues.

  Truth Be Told

  If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

  —MARK TWAIN

  My mother remembered everything; she had to. The woman loved to lie. Her relationship with the truth was like Jennifer Aniston’s relationship with Angelina Jolie—they weren’t close. I mentioned the “lying thing” to my mother once, and I even brought up the just-cited Mark Twain quote. Her response? “Where’s Mark Twain today? Dead, that’s where. Show’s what the fuck he knew.”

  Now, when I say she liked to lie, I don’t mean she lied pathologically, or told huge lies of global importance. It wasn’t like when Bill Clinton wagged his finger in the camera and denied wagging his schlong in Monica Lewinsky, or when Dick Cheney lied and said that waterboarding wasn’t torture, but just “freshening up.”

  To be fair, I think lie is an awfully strong term for what my mother did, because when she “circled around the truth,” she wasn’t doing it to hurt anyone, and if she did hurt someone, she would be mortified. That said, would she lie to get the upper hand in an argument, or to put herself in an advantageous business position? Absolutely. Would she do it to keep something private that shouldn’t be public? Absolutely, but who wouldn’t? (My mother told me that, in reality, world-class altruist Princess Diana hated hugging the lepers in Africa, and that the only reason she did so was because it gave her cover for the fact that she and the boyfriend had a secret fuck pad in the Serengeti. Of course, I have no way of knowing if that story was true.)

  Here are some terms I much prefer to use to describe my mother’s creative ways with the truth:

  • Embellish

  • Modify

  • Adjust

  • Interpret

  • Reinterpret

  • Fudge

  • Blur

  • In the neighborhood

  • Close enough

  • Tinkering with facts

  • Not totally accurate

  • Completely made up

  • Factually adjacent

  • You’re shittin’ me, right?

  Most of my mother’s fibs were simply embellishments to make a story she was telling better or more interesting. “Melissa, why bore people if you don’t have to? Leave that to Katie Couric.”

  For example, a few years ago, when my mother was on tour in Canada, she had a three-hour flight from Toronto to Winnipeg. She always called me after her flights landed, so I’d know she’d arrived safely. Sure enough, she calls me and tells me she’s arrived in Winnipeg. She then tells me the flight was delayed due to gale-force headwinds blowing in from the polar ice caps, that the plane had pitched and dropped—she thinks they hit a flock of geese—that passengers were being tossed around, and that it was a miracle they landed safely. Her assistant, Graham, who was travelling with her, told me that the skies were clear, the plane hit an air bump once, and the only tossing my mother did was in her sleep, once her Ambien kicked in. He said the miracle was that the flight was twenty minutes early and the airport actually had a gate ready and waiting for them. When I called my mother on her shit, I said, “Mom, why did you make all that up and make me nervous?” She said, “If I’d told you it was a simple, easy flight, would you have found it interesting?” I said, “No.” She said, “My point exactly. If I’d told you the truth, you would’ve clicked over and answered call waiting.”

  The irony is that when she actually did need to lie, as practiced as she was, she was a terrible liar. Last July, she wanted to get out of going to a dinner she was invited to at some agent’s house in Beverly Hills. Normally when she felt the need to duck out of a commitment like that, she’d make up some complex, multipronged, multilayered story (often involving gunplay or a carjacking), a lie in which she would, without fail, get caught. So I told her, “Mom, tonight, if you’re not going to tell the truth, that you’re just simply too tired to go out and would rather stay home and watch Investigation Discovery’s new episode of Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry?, then why don’t you just keep the lie simple? Just tell them you’re not feeling well, that you had bad shellfish for lunch? It’s happened to everybody, and nobody wants to hear the details.”

  So she calls. She tells them she had bad shellfish. Then she tells them the name of the restaurant she ate at; the fact that her waiter, Barry, couldn’t have been nicer; that she had trouble getting a cab so she’d called Uber; and that on her way home in her Uber car she’d puked in her purse, which really upset her driver, Mustafa. And even though she knew the tip was included, she gave him an extra ten for the trouble.

  Then she hung up. I said, “What part of ‘simple’ did you not understand? Now you’re going to get caught in the lie.” She looked me dead in the eye and said, “I think they believed me.” I said, “Trust me, they didn’t. Again I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell the truth.” She said, “Because the truth would not have been interesting. Now, shhhh; my show is starting.”

  One of her favorite games was answering the phone in a foreign accent, in case it was someone she didn’t want to talk to. Unfortunately, she wasn’t very good at accents; nor did she ever think she had a recognizable voice. Even Marlee Matlin would have recognized that lilting tone. It was certainly not the sound of tinkling bells or a peaceful, babbling brook. She also couldn’t keep the accent straight to one country. “Bonjour. ’Allo? No, Meez Rivers. She no ccchhome.” Then, once she realized it was someone she actually wanted to talk to, she’d drop the accent and go, “Oh, hi! So, anyway …”

  Movin’ on Up!

  In 1993, Gloria Steinem and the Ms. Foundation created the national Take Our Daughters to Work Day, and parents all across America started taking their daughters to their offices with them. A wonderful thing, but the start of a movement? Not really; my mother was doing that in 1973. And she wasn’t taking me to her office; she was taking me to Las Vegas.

  Early in her stand-up career my mother played Las Vegas thirty weeks a year, and I got a behind-the-scenes view of all the big stars she opened for—and she opened for everyone. I could list all their names here, but it would be easier just to list the people she didn’t open for: Frank Sinatra, Elvis, Liberace, and the Rat Pack (and that’s only because they predated her). She did have her regulars, though: Mac Davis, Neil Sedaka, Tony Bennett, Barry Manilow, Sergio Franchi, Bobby Vinton, Tony Orlando (with and without Dawn), Glenn Campbell, Engelbert Humperdinck, John Davidson, Tom Jones, Shirley MacLaine, Helen Reddy, and the Mamas and the Papas (after Cass Elliot died and they replaced her, creating the Stepmamas and the Papas), and Lola Falana.1

  My mother referred to herself as the Strip Slut because she’d peddle her wares at every hotel on Las Vegas Boulevard. After she’d close on Sunday night at Caesars Palace, we’d go back up to our room, pack our bags, and schlep across the street to the Sands, where she’d start working on Monday. I remember standing in the huge, sweeping hotel driveway watching her name come down on one marquee and go up on another. Years later, when she was a headliner, I was so excited and proud the first time I saw her name on the top of the marquee, in the big, fancy letters. I said, “Mommy, look how big your name is! What does that mean?” “It means we get free room service and a bigger dressing room.” She wasn’t totally kidding. She once told me, and reiterated it for the rest of her life, “As a performer, no matter how big you get, you always enter and exit through the kitchen.” This quote has been attributed to Jack Benny. She would always follow it up with “Missy, never forget—to the public, I’m famous, but to the casino owners, I’m just the hired help.”

  She was right. Las Vegas is all about casino money. The hotels and casinos don’t want their shows to go on for longer than ninety minutes because “time, literally, is money.”

  One night my mother was rocking the
house and was having such a good time that she ran five minutes over. The next day, she received a phone call asking if she knew that for every minute she ran over, it cost the casino two hundred thousand dollars. She was then asked if she thought she was a million dollars’ worth of funny. From that night forward, she always wore a watch onstage and had a big clock visible off in the wings.

  By the time I was six, I’d clocked more hours in Vegas than a Mafia bagman. I think our family single-handedly kept Western Airlines afloat—“Western Airlines, the only way to fly!”—shuttling us back and forth from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. While other first-graders were in school learning to add and subtract, I was at a blackjack table learning whether or not to hit on a hard sixteen. No one believes this, but before I could even recite the Pledge of Allegiance, I could recite my mother’s act, which made me very handy when she hadn’t performed in a while and was worried about being rusty. While she was in her makeup chair in the dressing room before the show, she’d have me sit on the edge of the bathtub and recite her act to her. To this day, if I had to, I could still give you a tight twenty. (“First wife, when you die, have all your jewelry buried on you. If the second one wants it, let the bitch dig for it.”)

  I also somehow retained all the aforementioned stars’ acts, which made for a very clever party trick. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a four-year-old do twelve minutes on going to the gynecologist; follow it with an a cappella version of “Copacabana,” with the backup parts included; and close with “In the Ghetto.” (For those of you who don’t know, Mac Davis wrote that song for Elvis, and Elvis allowed Mac to perform it in his act. I know because I could sing it.)

  This year, at Clive Davis’s famous pre–Grammy Awards party, I ran into Barry Manilow. He and my mom had been friends for years and had even worked together in the Greenwich Village nightclubs in New York City, when they were both starting out. Barry and I chatted for a few minutes, and then I told him I could still do his act for him. And if I’d had ninety minutes, I would have. But given that we were at a party and not a concert hall, he had to settle for my abbreviated version of his famed commercials medley. I don’t know if he was flattered or horrified, but either way, it was a fun moment for both of us.

  Las Vegas was and is a 24/7/365 town, so a lot of days, nights, and even holidays were spent with the children of all the other stars who were performing there at the time. Backstage at hotels was our playground. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé’s kids were always in charge because they were the oldest. I hung out with the Vintons’ kids, Neil Sedaka’s kids, and with Chastity Bono, just to name a few. We always wondered why Liberace had never had kids; he was such an outgoing fella.

  If you wanted to know what was going on in Las Vegas, all you had to do was tap into the Kid Mafia. We knew who was doing what and to whom. Not only did we know where to find the best game rooms and arcades, but we also knew the swimming pools with the most permissive lifeguards, who would let us jump in from the high dive. We even had the skinny on the original Siegfried and Roy scandal, back in the day when they were in a variety show and one of their big cats was accused of eating a member of the dog act. (I would tell you what actually happened, but on the advice of my mother, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid … wait, that’s not it; it’s something about loose lips and a shallow grave in the desert.)

  The MGM Grand hotel used to have a great movie theater that ran a different classic film each week. It was one of our favorite Kid Mafia hangouts—not because we were such huge fans of Gone with the Wind or The Little Dictator, but because the theater was across the hall from the arcade and the candy store. Our parents thought we were checking out Peter O’Toole and Charlie Chaplin when in fact we were checking out Donkey Kong and Red Vines. One time I had a loose tooth that I was working with everything I had. I knew that if it came out I’d have arcade money for the next day. So I snuck into the movie theater and enlisted one of Abbe Lane’s sons to help me pull the tooth out. We waited until the big, weepy death scene in Dark Victory and … yank! There was blood everywhere, but it was worth it. The blood trail led my mother to believe I was at the movies, and Bingo! The next day I had enough money for all my friends to play video games and develop sugar highs!

  I spent a lot of holidays and birthdays in Las Vegas. Christmas in Las Vegas was a little confusing. I remember once I asked my mother why the showgirl sitting on Santa’s lap was giggling and making Santa so happy and out of breath? She said, “Don’t ask. Pretend it’s a car accident and look away.”

  On my eleventh birthday I had an experience that I’m pretty sure most other kids never had. My mother was headlining in Las Vegas and the Village People were opening for her. On their way to the stage, some of them (the Cowboy, the Indian Chief, and the hairy guy in the assless chaps) popped their heads into the dressing room to say, “Happy Birthday” and give me a present. I got their latest album; my mother’s hairdresser got a date. In Las Vegas, everybody wins.

  1 Lola Falana insisted on being known as the First Lady of Las Vegas. So, every night onstage, she was introduced as “Lolafalanathefirstladyoflasvegas.” Repeat it often enough and it has a magical tone and small creatures might just appear at your door!

  Can I Take Your Order, Please?

  Melissa, according to a man I once knew, who shall remain nameless—let’s call him Not Your Father—room service is like a blow job; even when it’s bad, it’s good.

  —JOAN RIVERS

  I’m going to assume that most of you reading this book have, at some point in your lives, stayed in a hotel and ordered room service. (For those who haven’t, I’m going to guess that’s because either you’re in the Witness Protection Program and spend most of your days moving from safe house to safe house, or you have a highly contagious disease and are not only housebound but also swaddled in Saran Wrap like the Boy in the Plastic Bubble.1)

  My mother loved room service almost as much as she hated cooking. (“If God wanted me to cook, he would have made my hands aluminum.”) She believed that room service was God’s apology to the Jews for our having to spend forty years wandering the desert and living on a diet of matzoh and camel dung. (At Passover my mother used to amend the Bible stories to conform to her version of history. “Melissa, how much did God love us? For forty years we lived on unleavened bread, which is terribly binding, yet if you check out the photos from those days, all the Jews were thin. Not a bloated salesman or hippy housewife in the bunch. How does that happen? It’s a miracle, that’s how. Thank you, God. Amen.”)

  Just as they did with towels, linens, and soaps, mi madre y padre figured out how to game the room service system. Room service used to charge by the number of setups (that’s why they ask you how many people it is for), so they’d hide some of the setup from the morning meal and use them for later. They’d make me drink cereal from a glass, so we’d have two forks and a knife left over for lunch. By the end of the week, they were paying us to eat in.

  Starting at the age of five, no matter what city or what kind of hotel we were in, I always had to “dress” for room service, as though I were dining in a five-star restaurant. I thought this was stupid, so one night, in one of my argumentative moods, I snapped at my mother, “Why the hell do I have to dress up for room service? This is ridiculous. Who’s going to see me?” She jumped all over that one. “The waiter, Melissa, that’s who. There’s a fifty percent chance he’s single and sixty percent chance he’s straight. You’re not getting any younger. Play the odds, dress up!” I said, “Ma! Are you serious?” She said, “Yes, I am. You don’t know, his father might own this hotel, and you’re going to blow the chance at living on an estate and owning a yacht because you’re too lazy to get out of your holey sweat pants.”

  And you wonder why so many children of celebrities drink.

  Once my mother’s career had taken off, we stayed only in hotels that had twenty-four-hour room service. Quite reasonable, considering she sometimes didn’t come offstage until 11:00 p.m., and after doi
ng meet and greets, and signing autographs, we often didn’t get back to our hotel until after 1:00 a.m. Even on days off between shows, we’d order room service late at night. I think in part because our body clocks were timed to my mother’s performance schedule. We were used to eating late, like they do in New York or Paris or Spain. (In New York, cooking is an anomaly; in fact, really smart landlords list the oven as a “quaint second bedroom” and jack up the rent another thousand dollars.)

  I think the other reason my mother liked to order food late was because she couldn’t stand people who ate dinner really early. She once said, “You know who eats dinner early, Melissa? Children, old people, Christian farmhands, and prisoners, that’s who. Now go call your father and tell him dinner’s at eight.”

  1 The Boy in the Plastic Bubble was a TV movie starring John Travolta, about a boy who had to live inside a plastic bubble2 because he couldn’t be exposed to germs. Needless to say, he was never able to get a job working in the kitchen of a Korean restaurant.

  2 A plastic bubble is a large, transparent, incubator-like structure.

  * * *

  My parents felt there were never enough lamps in hotel rooms, so my mother would call down to the front desk or the concierge and ask for an extra lamp. (She made those calls, not my father. Apparently the two of them decided that her voice was far more intimidating than his. In hindsight, I concur.) Invariably, her request would be denied, usually with a brusque “We have no extra lamps.” And she’d reply, in an equally brusque tone, “Are you telling me that if the president of the United States came to this hotel and asked for an extra lamp, you wouldn’t get him one?” The concierge would say, “No, we’d find one.” And she’d say, “Well, I promise you he’s not coming; you can safely give me that lamp.”