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

by Melissa Rivers

  Lock Up Your Virgins

  Patti Stanger has made a fortune as the host and creator of the hit television series Millionaire Matchmaker. This galled my mother to no end. Basically, because she’d spent most of her (and my) adult life trying to fix me up with Mr. Right (as opposed to Mr. Right Now). And not only did none of them pan out into any sort of long-term, committed relationship, but she never made a dime off her efforts. “You do realize that Patti isn’t married, don’t you?” she snapped at me one night while we were watching the show. I said, “I’m sure Patti’s fine, and when she gets lonely, she can go to the bank and hug the hedge fund guy who handles her millions.”

  One of the biggest wishes in my mother’s life was for me to be married and settled down with a good man. She was miserable when I was single—and considering that I’m forty-six and I was married for only three years, that leaves her with forty-three years of misery. I get why she wanted me to be married, or at least be with someone for the long haul. Even though she was a self-made woman, she didn’t make the journey to the top by herself; she had my father walking beside her for most of it. She felt it was easier for a woman (or a gay man) to get ahead if there was a man to help balance her life and cover her ass. That’s what she wanted for me.

  Her search began on my first day of third grade. All the children in my school had to stand up in assembly that day and tell everyone a little something about themselves. Obviously the parents had trained them in what to say. “I’m Neil Conyers. My daddy’s a doctor, and I want to be a baseball player.” “I’m Tammy Levy, and I’m four feet tall, and I have a sister named Ivy.” Then it was my turn. “I’m Melissa Rosenberg, and I’m single, and I’d like to meet a nice Jewish boy with liquid assets and a good nose.” Some of the teachers laughed, and some were appalled. My mother just smiled knowingly and waited in the back of the auditorium to collect phone numbers.

  Since I had steady boyfriends all through high school and college, and then got married, most of the damage to my mother came after I was divorced.

  She tried and tried to set me up on dates, and it was awful and awful. It just never worked.

  For example, once she called me and said she had met the most charming, successful, athletic, handsome man. “Can I give him your number?” she asked. I said, “Fine.” She said, “Good! I already have. He’s coming out to LA for work.” So I arrange to meet him at a restaurant. I get there, and he stands up and walks over to me and says, “Hi, Melissa. I’m Dave. Your mother said we’d be a perfect match.” Turns out she was right; we were a perfect match. We were both five foot three. Actually I’m kidding. I’m five three. He was closer to five two—maybe. And that’s with lifts and standing on his tippy toes. We were talking about skiing and I looked down and saw that his feet were dangling off the end of his chair. I called my mother later and said, “Mom, what the fuck? You know I like taller guys. He’s two feet tall!” She said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I only saw him sitting behind a table. I didn’t see him standing up.” I said, “Maybe you did.”

  Another time, she and two of her lesbian fans went on a mission to find me a man. The lesbians set me up on a date with a doctor they adored. They gave my mom his info. She e-mailed him to try to set us up on a date. He called her back and told her, “I have two rules: I do not date my patients, and I do not date women.” Didn’t faze her in the least. All she cared about was that he was a doctor. She used to say that visiting a sick friend in the hospital wasn’t just a good deed; it was an opportunity. “You never know; you could meet a single doctor. Make sure you go in full hair and makeup, tight jeans, a low-cut blouse, and high heels.” Ahh, the perfect look in a cardiac care unit.

  In her world, being married to a doctor was the ultimate success, and if I wanted to marry a doctor, she felt I should put myself in a position to meet one. She used my cousin Andrew’s wife, Laurie, as an example. “Melissa! She is a nurse. That’s how she managed to snag Andrew. She got herself a doctor!” “So now I should quit my showbiz career and go to nursing school so I can meet a doctor?” She said, “Wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”

  In hindsight, I feel I should’ve seen all the yenta-ing coming. When I was in sixth grade she took me to see a production of Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway. Every time the town matchmaker, Yente, hit the stage, my mother would nod, elbow me, and mutter under her breath. “Humph. Pay attention, Melissa. You’re not getting younger.”

  (Years later she did the same thing when we went to see a revival of Fiddler starring my mother’s good friend Rosie O’Donnell as Golde. Rosie was great, but her Yiddish accent sounded so much like an Irish brogue that my mother leaned over and said, “I didn’t know Anatevka was a suburb of Dublin.”)

  As I write this, although I’ve started dating someone, I’m technically single—which would have made my mother very anxious. Mom, if you’re reading this—don’t worry. I still have Patti Stanger’s private number.

  * * *

  When it came to my boyfriends my mother had no middle ground; she either liked them or hated them. The ones I liked the most she liked the least. Oddly, she seemed to prefer the rich ones.

  The Purse

  The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World are the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and the Colossus of Rhodes.1 I would like to nominate an eighth: my mother’s purse.

  A couple of years ago we were going through airport security and something in her bag started beeping, so the TSA agents pulled her over to the side for a security check. She didn’t mind the pat-down (in fact, I think she enjoyed it and might even have tried to give the agent her number), but when they decided to empty her purse, things got ugly.

  She didn’t feel violated with a strange man patting her ass, yet one going through her purse was a step too far. She started in with “What do you think, I’m a criminal or a drug mule? That’s right, I’m part of the famed Finkelstein cartel and I’ve got a kilo of coke in my vagina.”

  First off, her purse weighed between eighteen and twenty-five pounds. (Its weight fluctuated, just like my mother’s, depending on the time of year, her exercise regimen, or whether she’d had Chinese food the night before and was feeling a little puffy.) All women carry around a lot of useless junk in our purses, but twenty-five pounds is a lot of junk. Even the TSA agents, who have seen everything, were shocked at the weight. (Can I mention that my mother weighed only one hundred ten pounds, so she was carrying around nearly a quarter of her own body weight? No one ever believes me when I say she must have had the physical strength of a titan.)

  When they dumped the bag, here’s what they found (and I know this because they inventoried everything): in her wildly overstuffed wallet (besides the obvious driver’s license, credit cards, etc.) were dozens of receipts, random business cards from all over the world, discount coupons from stores she would never in a million years shop in, a dry-cleaning ticket from 2006, and so many one-dollar bills that I thought that she was pole dancing at a senior citizens’ home in Great Neck. This entire apparatus was held together by a frayed rubber band.

  Also in the purse? More loose receipts, hundreds of jokes written on napkins from airline lounges (both paper and cloth), a box of Altoids, eleven loose Altoids, a large makeup bag, a full-size box of Kleenex, three pairs of glasses (none of which were the ones she was looking for), one and a half screw-top splits of wine stolen from airplane carts when the flight attendants weren’t looking, a half-eaten piece of cheese, and random one-hundred-calorie snack bags (usually partially eaten).2

  They also found a single hair extension that she had pulled out during the day because it was bothering her, two bottles of the same color nail polish, dog treats, and the things all grandmas carry in their purses: Purell, hard candies, a tissue (this tissue was not included in the aforementioned full box of Kleenex), a living will, and an actual lace handkerchief (“Mel
issa, a lady always carries a handkerchief”). And, somewhere in the bottom of this, was her private “I can’t find my” cell phone.

  The most interesting item the TSA uncovered was a Ziploc bag filled with bacon bits and a small bottle of what appeared to be blood. (It was fake, but she didn’t want anyone to know that. In her head, it was a vial of street cred à la Angie and Billy Bob.) She had carried this Ziploc since right after 9/11, so that if her plane were ever taken over by terrorists, she could throw the blood and pork on them, and they’d never get their seventy-two virgins in heaven. (Not that she believed in heaven or hell, but just on the off chance that they existed, and on the off chance she would be heading south, she was going to make sure that that motherfucker terrorist from Al Qaeda would be riding that same train with her.)

  This was her usual everyday purse. Don’t ask about the travel bag; I simply don’t have that kind of time. By the way, the beeping sound that set off this whole episode was coming from a Miracle Ear she’d found in her seat cushion on a flight she took weeks before and had forgotten to turn in to the airport Lost and Found.

  P.S. When we finally got on the plane I asked her what her inspiration was for the giant purse, and she said, Felix the Cat. For those of you under a certain age, Felix the Cat was an old TV cartoon character who schlepped a “magic bag of tricks” with him everywhere he went. (Google him.) As was the case with most animated characters, Felix was constantly finding himself in strange predicaments he couldn’t get out of. His bag contained everything and anything: ladders, motorcycles, disguises, guns, food—whatever was needed to free Felix from the tight spot he was in and move the story forward. At first I found this odd, but when I thought about it, it made perfect sense. First of all, Felix must have been gay, and you know how much my mother loved the gays. No straight man, or cat, not even the really sexually secure European ones, will publicly carry a pocketbook, a purse, or a murse. Secondly, Felix’s magic bag looked like it was Louis Vuitton. Since the show was animated, it was hard to tell if the bag was real or a knockoff, but either way, I’m not surprised it caught my mother’s attention. It also explains why she made me watch that cartoon every Saturday morning, way past the age when I would have found it interesting. Another subtle life lesson.

  1 My mother had a joke in her act that the Colossus of Rhodes was really just Cee Lo Green doing a concert in Greece.

  2 The food items were kept in a foil-lined pocket she had in her bag. She told me she had learned this trick when she was a little girl from her aunt Fay. She said Aunt Fay liked to steal food from restaurants, and she had a brown purse that was totally empty and lined with silver foil. She said when Aunt Fay came for dinner, if she had the brown purse with her it meant they were going out as opposed to eating in.

  Dr. Frankenstein and the Red Carpet Monster

  When my mother and I turned the award show red carpet into the RED CARPET in 1995, we had no idea we were creating a brand that would become as Americana as apple pie, ice cream, and Kim Kardashian’s ass. If we had, we’d have been sittin’ pretty, instead of hawking tchotchkes on QVC.1

  That year neither one of us had much going on. My mom was between gigs, and I had done a talk show pilot that hadn’t gotten picked up. Then one of the executives at E! called my mother and asked her if she wanted to do live interviews at The Golden Globes. She said, “Sure!” Then: “How much?” When they told her, she said, “Sure-ish.” (I believe this is when she coined the phrase “You can’t spell cheap without E!” which she used to say on air at any given opportunity. We were live; what could they do about it?) At that time, the red carpet was nothing more than a photo op of famous people walking into a building. We were lucky enough to be the ones who turned walking into a building into an event. That first year, my mother’s partner was the late Eleanor Mondale. Their chemistry was fine but not natural, because they didn’t know each other and had never met prior to that. So when E! decided to broadcast the Oscars later that year, my name came up.

  I had already been on-air talent at MTV and had served as a correspondent for CBS This Morning. I was also the second choice for what would become The Ricki Lake Show,2 so I was something of a known commodity. (FYI, I adore Ricki Lake, who is one of the loveliest people I know.)

  The execs at E! called my mother once again, this time to ask her if she thought I’d be interested in doing the red carpet show with her. Earlier that week I must’ve committed some awful transgression against her wishes, like cutting my bangs,3 so her answer to E! was a very terse “I have no idea what she wants to do or what she’s thinking. You’re going to have to ask her yourself; apparently my opinion doesn’t matter. Besides, she doesn’t listen to anything I say anyway. And if I ask her she’ll probably say no just to spite me.”

  (And that is how the sweet, heartwarming story of Joan & Melissa came to be.)

  But I said yes, and we started the wheels rolling on what has become, years later, a television locomotive.

  One of the first things we had to do was figure out what kind of show we were doing. It was a red carpet, not a yellow brick road, so we had to ask real questions, not Hollywood fantasy pabulum. We also knew that even though we both had interviewing experience, we weren’t trained journalists, so we couldn’t ask probing questions of international importance. (We didn’t want to make amateur mistakes, like telling people we’d been shot down in a helicopter while covering the war in Iraq when we hadn’t been.) My mother and I were well aware that even the biggest stars might be nervous, trying to (a) not say something stupid and (b) remember to act sincere when they said, “Oh, it’s just an honor to be nominated,” so we figured the best way to calm them down was to have fun ourselves. We decided to treat the whole event like a giant cocktail party, with good conversation, funny quips, and bitchy asides and hope the audience found it as much fun as we did. And even though we were working, we always had fun. Part of the reason we had such a good time was that my mother and I had a natural rhythm (one that got even better through the years), we trusted each other creatively, and we knew our roles. Since no one could out-funny Joan Rivers, we “decided” to let her be the funny one and I’d play it straight. Talk about a no-brainer.

  After a while, our act was so well known that you could just say “Joan and Melissa” and people knew what they were getting.4 And in time, the red carpet shows became more important (and more watched) than some of the events themselves. So, to E! I say, “Thank you.” And “You’re welcome.”

  1 Things we didn’t think of when we were creating the red carpet shows, and that continue to haunt my dreams at least every ten days, and during award season virtually every three hours: We didn’t copyright, trademark, brand, or even figure out a way to charge admission to the carpet. We never thought to start a fantasy fashion sports book, where people could bet on who was going to win what (which designer will win, which star will win, etc.). We never thought to get sponsorship from Dyson vacuums. You wouldn’t believe the shit the stars leave in their wake when they walk the red carpet. It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback and play the “coulda’, woulda’, shoulda’ ” game, but the truth is, we loved every minute of every red carpet event and are proud to have created it.

  2 FYI, I was also the second choice for the lead prisoner in Oz, the third Real Housewife of Beverly Hills, and the fifth-youngest Von Trapp Family singer.

  3 Apparently bangs were a hot-button topic for my mother. In one of the last conversations we ever had, she said, “Melissa, get your bangs off of your face. You look like a sheepdog, and when people can’t see your eyes they think you’re shifty.”

  4 I’m lost as a performer right now, but I will find my own voice. I was taught by the best.

  * * *

  When we started our red carpet shows, we didn’t have a clue that the simple question “Who are you wearing?” would make the red carpet more important for designers than Fashion Week or the September issue of Vogue. At the time, we did not realize that having an A-list ce
lebrity in a gown would be worth more to a designer than a million dollars in advertising. Had we realized that, we could’ve made celebrities wear branded jumpsuits just like they do in NASCAR. We could have sold ad space on limos once we created Limo Cam. (“Cameron Diaz, brought to you by Prilosec!”) Hell, we could have sold ad space on Christina Hendricks’s cleavage. Ahh, hindsight is 20/20. (Or, in Christina’s case, 40 DD.)

  The Red Carpet Means You’ve Made It!

  I think most people don’t realize they’re doing something transformative while they’re doing it; it’s usually the passage of time that allows them to see the impact of what they’ve done. There are exceptions to that rule, I’m sure. I’m guessing Neil Armstrong knew that walking on the moon was a pretty big deal when he took that first small step for man. I’ll assume Thomas Edison realized he’d done something important when all of a sudden he wasn’t bumping into his furniture in the dark. And I’ll bet Ray Kroc figured he was on to something when he invented the Big Mac and three weeks later America was filled with tens of thousands of morbidly obese children. But my mother and I didn’t realize the red carpet had become a rite of passage for celebrities until Sofia Coppola mentioned it to me at a party in Cannes.

  And once the celebrities realized that Joan and Melissa’s red carpet was a destination, they were usually available and ready.