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

by Melissa Rivers

  I’ve often wondered if the personality traits we exhibit as children we continue to exhibit as adults. I offer up to you the closest I can get to scientific proof that this is so. Over the next few pages, I hereby present portions of my mother’s report cards, grades one through four.

  Brains vs. Boobs

  Men don’t want smart. They want gorgeous. No man ever put his hand up a woman’s dress looking for a library card.

  —JOAN RIVERS

  on The Tonight Show

  My mother truly believed that men care more about beauty than brains, and that a man would rather spend twenty years with a stunning dunce than twenty minutes with Eleanor Roosevelt. Yet she insisted that I go to college. For years I found that highly insulting.

  As a child I didn’t go through the public school system; my parents sent me to private school. Not that they had anything against public schools (“Missy, the only thing wrong with public schools is the public”); they just thought I’d thrive better in private schools. I personally think they wasted their money. I grew up in Beverly Hills. How bad could the public schools have been? I believe Beverly Hills has the only junior high school in the country that offers its students personal shoppers and cold storage for their furs. In our neck of the woods the only difference between the public and private schools was that in the private schools the drug dealers drove Bentleys, not low-riders.

  Private schools are like colleges in that you have to be accepted by a board of admissions to get in. This is true today even for private nursery and pre-K schools. Parents have to “sell the school board” on their child, like they’re prized pigs at auction. How many “extracurricular activities” could a three-year-old have? “Well, Headmaster Jones, in addition to knowing his ABCs and being able to identify most of the Muppets, in his free time little Billy likes to stack his juice boxes in size order and loves making symmetrical pancakes out of his BMs.”

  When I was in the elementary grades, or until the time I exceeded my parents’ academic abilities, my mom and dad were very hands-on. They checked every bit of homework I had—or at least the assignments I told them I had. (I need to make amends here to my fourth-grade teacher: Sorry, Señora Diaz. I think I still owe you a few assignments. I’ll try to get them to you before 2017.) My mother would help me with history, foreign languages, social studies, and humanities, and my father would help me with math. So as not to miss a moment of being involved, when my father was helping me with arithmetic my mother would sit on the floor next to us and take my Magic Markers and color in the worn spots on our Oriental rugs.

  My parents made sure that all my assignments were not only factually accurate but that the grammar and punctuation also were correct. (This kind of attention to detail paid off last year when the piece I wrote for my mother’s memorial service was considered by many to be a grammarian’s wet dream. Mom, red pen in hand, would have been happy.)

  My mother was very involved (i.e., competitive) when it came to class projects, but I think she came by that honestly.

  In second grade my class had to do book reports. One little girl’s father was a studio chief and had had the studio’s art department mock up a storyboard for his daughter’s book report presentation. This infuriated my mother because she is very artsy-craftsy and she hadn’t cheated and helped me with my report. The only comfort was that the girl didn’t get an A, although she did get an Oscar nomination for Best Art Direction.

  Learning from that experience, my mother, over the past five or six years, tried to “get an edge” for Cooper in his class projects by trying to call in favors from her creative friends (like painter Robert Rauschenberg), but I watched her like a hawk, to make sure she didn’t cheat to get him an A. I’d rather Cooper get a hard-earned B than a tainted A. (Yes, dear reader, I know what you’re thinking: Tainted A is the private nickname of one of Hollywood’s most famous actresses, but no, under the advice of counsel, I cannot tell you who it is.)

  Unlike my mother, I am not artsy-craftsy, and I won’t cheat, so Cooper’s fifth-grade science class volcano was a little lopsided, and instead of erupting, it leaked. The good news was that none of the little cardboard people in Pompeii died in rivers of “lava”; they just got their shoes wet.

  My mother’s take on cheating was born of the best intentions—she wanted me to have the best education possible, which is why she and my father worked so hard to send me to the best schools. This was especially true after my elementary years, when I was heading into seventh grade. In Los Angeles, that meant the exclusive, academically demanding finishing school the Marlborough School for Girls. (Hard to guess from the name that it was WASPy, huh? The school mascot was a jar of mayonnaise. Ba-rum-bum.)

  At the interview for Marlborough my parents said to the über-Anglo-Saxon head of admissions, “We know you have a quota system and our Melissa fills two of the boxes: showbiz and Jewish.” And they still let me in. I was a human twofer!

  I lasted at Marlborough until tenth grade, when the lockjawed, estrogen-filled WASPishness began overwhelming me. My parents felt I wasn’t thriving as they’d hoped in the all-girls, cliquey school—where I was a year younger than my classmates because I’d skipped a grade—so they transferred me to the Buckley School, which was just as academically rigorous but offered things Marlborough didn’t: less-mean girls, a kinder, gentler environment … and boys!

  During my time at Buckley, shockingly, I spent a lot of time in detention (or the home version of detention: grounded) for things like ditching classes, violating the dress code, not doing my homework, and engaging in “excessive fraternizing.” With the exception of petty larceny, arson, and aggravated vandalism, I did it all—and I was considered one of the good kids.

  In hindsight, I see that nothing I ever did was all that bad. I was just rebellious by nature, and I never understood why I was being forced to wear saddle shoes when my topsiders, Vans, and Keds looked so much better with the school uniform! (Ironic that my mother wound up on Fashion Police in light of the fact that her own child went to a school that made the students wear uniforms until graduation. “Zere vill be no freedom of expression ven it comes to fashion. You vill do as you are told and you vill like it!” Little did I know that the “Catholic school girl” look was actually a sexual fetish and that our school was inadvertently prepping some of the girls for the items they’d cherish later in life: g-strings, stilettos, sequined thongs, and stripper poles.)

  After Marlborough and Buckley came college. In the Rosenberg-Rivers family, going to college wasn’t a choice; it was an understanding. (If I remember correctly, when I was a senior in high school, I once said, in a passively rebellious moment, “Mommy, I don’t think I’m going to go to college.” She took a long pause and said, “Have we met? You look familiar, but I’m sure I don’t know you.”) Which college to go to wasn’t much of a choice, either; my options were big Ivy League or small Ivy League (there is no medium Ivy League). I could have had the IQ of a houseplant and my parents still would have had me filling out applications for Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, and Penn. I believe my mother’s exact words were “Melissa, if you go west of the Mississippi, you pay.”

  For Cooper, going to college isn’t a choice, either; it’s an understanding. He is expected to live up to the same standards that were oh so gently forced upon me. I have already brainwashed my child as to what schools are acceptable: big Ivy or small Ivy. Although I have cut him some slack and let him pick Johns Hopkins and Duke as fallback schools, that’s only because they have world-class lacrosse teams.

  FYI, as I write this, Cooper is in eighth grade. But why procrastinate four years and wait until twelfth grade when I can start the nagging now?

  * * *

  The first interview for college my parents took me on was at buttoned-down, conservative, old-fashioned Williams. The Three Jew-migos drove up in a long, white stretch limo singing “We Are What We Are” at the top of our lungs. I went to Penn.1

  1 From what I’ve been told,
I had a very good time there.

  Better Living Through Candy

  Although I was raised in Southern California, my parents were not your stereotypical kale-eating, granola-munching, meditation-loving West Coasters. I learned that all on my own. As an adult, I try to lead a healthy lifestyle—I eat right, I work out, and I take my meds on time. I’m in pretty good shape. This is because, when I was growing up, I took my mother’s diet plan … and ignored it completely.

  First off, as I mentioned before, my mother never cooked. Her signature dish was takeout. If she’d had a job as a prison chef, no one ever would have been executed. They’d never have received the last meal they were legally entitled to. Right up until the end of her life my mother believed that, in a pinch, ketchup, Altoids, and Milk Duds were a three-course meal.1

  That doesn’t mean we didn’t sit down to dinner together every night. We did. And my parents would start the meal by thanking God not only for the abundance of food, but also for the abundance of restaurants offering free delivery within thirty minutes. If my parents were going out for dinner, they’d set up a tray in their bedroom so I could eat while they were getting ready. This way we could still engage in family table talk—backbiting, celebrity gossip, and grilling me about my life as if it were the Spanish Inquisition. It was a simpler time.

  To their credit, even though they were very busy and not even remotely involved in the culinary arts (defrosting was a challenge), my parents tried to do it right. They made sure I had at least the minimum daily requirement of vegetables, protein, and gummy bears. I was a terribly picky eater, but it wasn’t my fault. It was hard to take my mother’s nutritional advice seriously when she’d sit down at the dinner table and her plate was made up of M&M’s, Fritos, and a glass of white wine.

  My father had a different approach: he decided to forgo explaining the value of nutrition to me and simply pay me to eat. It’s not that he didn’t care about my health and well-being; he was just tired of arguing with me and realized that it was easier to trade cash for peace. (I like to think of myself back then as akin to a budding arms dealer or creating a blueprint for NAFTA.) After years of hounding and cajoling and bribing, they finally gave up when they walked into the kitchen one morning and found me hunched over the sink having a breakfast of Pop Tarts and Diet Coke. When I got to college, I had an epiphany about nutrition. I realized that good-looking men weren’t generally drawn to women who wolfed down Pop Tarts and Diet Coke hunched over the sink. So I started eating better and made sure that I was home alone, with the curtains drawn, before I ate microwave popcorn and Hot Pockets for dinner. And now, as a mother, I’m proud to say that Cooper does the same thing.

  1 I recently found out that, when travelling, my mother used to hide cash in empty Milk Duds boxes—they’re the same size as paper money—so in case someone rifled her purse, they’d overlook it. This information came to light this past December, and I can’t tell you the chill that ran through my body, knowing how much cleaning we had done after she died.

  Boy Meets Girl (or Whatever)

  When it came to my mother teaching/advising/cautioning/warning me about dating and romance, listening to her was like playing Truth or Dare with a pre-op transsexual: I never knew what I was going to get. On the one hand, my mother talked about love in an old-fashioned manner; on the other hand, she spoke like the whore of Babylon.

  My mother felt that “courting” was a game I needed to know and know how to play. She fancied herself a modern-day courtesan in how she behaved and treated her men. To be fair, she did have two legitimate long-term relationships after my father’s passing. I actually got to see her in her “courtesaning” mode, flirting with men she was interested in. The only thing I can say about that is it’s one of those things that, once you see, you can’t unsee, and it will haunt you for the rest of your life.

  She always told me, “Dating is a game. When you’re dating, trust me, they don’t really love how you look when you don’t have your makeup on, even though they say they do. They don’t want to hear about your ailments and your worries. Men are basic: they want you to look pretty and be good in bed. Oh, and if you’re smart and funny, that’s nice—let your friends enjoy that side of your personality. No man ever wants to be reminded that women are truly superior. Yes, the truth makes them that insecure. You can be smarter than them or funnier than them, but not both.”

  One mantra she lived by was to “make sure the man always thinks he’s the best and the smartest, and that every time you look at him, he thinks you’re thinking, ‘Honey, I need you.’ ” The fact that men are inherently stupid makes this not such a hard task to accomplish.

  One of my mother’s good friends was the wife of a famous billionaire financier—you can guess which one; I’m not telling. When my mother would have them over for dinner, her friend would sit at the table with her hand in her chin, hanging on her rich husband’s every word. “Oh, sweetheart, that is so wise. You are such a sage.” My mother said the only way she managed not to laugh or vomit was to look at the ring on her friend’s finger and think, “Check out the ring on her finger; who’s sage-ing whom?”

  My mother treated her men the same way. She tried making them feel like they were the best things God had ever put on the planet, even better than Bergdorf or Saks.

  She was coy, and was always about “making life better for her man.” She instinctively knew what buttons to push to make a man feel good about himself, and would push them as needed. (Conversely, she knew which buttons to push to make me feel bad; of course she knew those buttons; she’d installed them.) She’d say things like “Oh, Lenny, I love the way your love handles drag on the floor; I don’t have to vacuum,” or “Milton, it really turns me on the way your hair plugs tickle my thighs.” She may not have been honest in the boudoir, but she was smart. “Melissa, making a man’s life better may take a little work and a little craftiness, but it will earn you large, shiny necklaces afterward.” When I replied, “I can buy my own shiny necklaces,” she said, “Of course you can; but why should you?”

  My mother often gave me tips on dating. Some were actually good, and some were ridiculous. For example, she told me always to wear heels. They make your legs look better. (She even suggested to me that I play tennis in them.) “Even if he’s just coming over to relax, answer the door in heels. You can always kick them off and curl your feet under you on the couch like Marilyn Monroe.” Not a bad suggestion.

  On the flip side, she also suggested that before a man came to the house to pick me up for a date, I should send flowers to myself so that when he walked in he’d be jealous and say, “Who sent you those beautiful flowers?” I don’t know about anybody else, but not one man I dated ever noticed the flowers in my house. Not even the mortician I went out with once. (Don’t ask. In bed he wanted to put pennies on my eyes and have me lie perfectly still.)1

  My mother was from an era when men asked out women, and wined them and dined them in the hope of getting (a) a relationship, (b) a wife, or (c) a good roll in the hay. She used to tell me that when she was young, there were always one or two girls in her high school who were “fast” and who “put out,” but most of them stayed virgins until they got married. “Things have changed, Missy. Now they only stay virgins until homeroom.”

  She believed that today’s women have “fucked it up for themselves” because they give it up so quickly. On Fashion Police she hated seeing the young stars dressed like sluts because it sent a message that girls were available for the taking.

  Her concern about teen sluttiness was genuine. My mom worried that a lot of today’s youth would miss out on the wonderful rites of passage that she, and to some extent I, had. She used to talk about the innocent experiences of flirting, and passing notes in class, and holding hands. As forward-thinking and trend-conscious as she was, she was still old-fashioned in certain ways. She didn’t like everything about modern technology. “Melissa, in my day a boy asked you out, bought you flowers, and had you home at a re
asonable hour. In high school we had boyfriends and girlfriends, not baby daddies and baby mamas. I hear about all these college kids sexting pictures of their junk. It’s not right. If I want to see a young penis, I’ll take a shower with Chaz Bono.”

  DATING TIPS MY MOTHER GAVE ME

  • Take breath mints with you. No man, not even one with BO and a sinus condition, wants to kiss a girl who has the breath of death.

  • Always have lipstick, powder, and a mirror in your purse. It takes five minutes to freshen up and look good, but it only takes five seconds with lipstick on your teeth to ruin a relationship.

  • Never pick up the check. “You have the vagina, he has the wallet. He pays.”

  • Let him open the door for you. If he doesn’t, and leaves you standing in the street, turn around, get in a cab, and go home. If he leaves you in the street, he’ll leave you for another woman.

  • Never give it up on the first date, because once you do, you give away your power. And once you give it up, you’d better make sure you’re so good at it that it’s like an addiction. (She would actually send me articles on how to be good in bed and how to give good blow jobs. I’m surprised she didn’t try to hire me a tutor.)

  • Never carry condoms. Those are his responsibility. “Women who carry condoms don’t look like Girl Scouts who are always prepared; they look like prostitutes who are always at the free clinic.”

  • Make sure he’s straight. Gay men make great BFFs but lousy boyfriends. Any man who mentions Bette Midler more than once a year, or who gets giddy when he realizes that you two look good in the same colors, is probably not a good dating choice. (“Hey, honey, check this out: we’re both autumns!”)