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

by Melissa Rivers

  My favorite swag gift of all time came at one of the ESPY Awards shows in the late 1990s. To this day I remember that bag vividly: tennis rackets, sneakers, and other workout gear, and training sessions. But the best thing of all was a year’s supply of free Jamba Juice. ESPN, I thank you, and my abs thank you.

  No one liked a good swag bag like my mom. It didn’t matter what time of year it was, when that swag bag arrived she’d become as giddy as a kid getting a new puppy on Christmas morning. She’d gather everyone around the bag and open it, carefully taking out each item one by one. Then she’d start auctioning things off. It was like an episode of The Price Is Right. People would be guesstimating and bidding, and my mother would be like Bob Barker, except without all the animals and the pawing and the grabbing at the models. I’m not saying it would get aggressive or borderline violent, but I still have a small scar on my wrist from our longtime assistant Sabrina lunging at me for a coveted new bottle of Chanel nail polish.

  1 To be perfectly honest, the assistants aren’t the only ones who miss the swag bag. I’ve been sitting shiva over its demise for five years now.

  2 At this year’s Oscars, the swag bags were back, and glitzier and gaudier than ever before. You should have seen the smiles on the faces of actors and their sober companions.

  Something in the Oven

  Before I start the show I want to announce that the singer Adele has just given birth to her first child, a beautiful, bouncing baby boy. Sixty-eight pounds, twelve ounces.

  —JOAN RIVERS

  October 12, 2012, Royal Albert Hall, London, UK

  On one of my mother’s appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1968, she was pregnant with me, but due to the network’s broadcasting standards of the day, the censors at CBS wouldn’t allow her to use the word pregnant. She had to use other words and expressions to explain away the maternity dress, big belly, and umbilical cord she was wearing as a belt. She always resented that, and from that point forward she hated euphemisms. So when I became pregnant with Cooper, I knew telling her about it was going to be a straightforward conversation, which is just as well, because if I had tried to use euphemisms, it wouldn’t have been pretty.

  If I had said, “Mom, in a couple of months you’re going to hear the pitter-patter of little feet,” she’d have thought there were rats in the attic or that I’d made a deal to rent the house out for one of those cable shows involving dwarves, little people, or folks who are just small enough to make us question.

  If I’d said I had “something in the oven,” she’d probably have launched into a rant about Heidi Klum or have gotten all crazy that “Betty Crocker isn’t even a real person and that bitch is making a fortune selling cake!”

  I thought about trying something sweet and funny, like taking her out to dinner and having the waiter keep pushing the baby carrots and baby artichokes, or having the maître d’ bring a high chair to the table even though we weren’t having dinner with Peter Dinklage. I also thought it might be sweet to secretly leave a “Dear Grandma” note in her purse. In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t. My mother was a stickler for grammar, and I knew that rather than rejoicing at the good news, she’d have started correcting my punctuation and usage. Last year, just for fun—okay, not for fun; let’s call it pop culture research for Fashion Police; it sounds better—we were going through ads on dating websites to see how people were meeting and hooking up these days. Within five minutes my mother was correcting people’s grammar. “It’s whom do you wish to fondle, not who,” and “Everyone knows there’s no h in bukkake. What an idiot.”

  All kidding aside, I had a miscarriage before Cooper, so when I became pregnant again, what to say, when to say it, and whom to tell were actually important issues. I decided that I wouldn’t say anything to anyone for three months.

  If I had told my mother too soon she’d have been following me around the house like a paparazzo following a Kardashian, and if I had told her too late, she’d have been following me around the house like a Jewish mother. Hey, wait, that’s not funny. So, I decided that the best time to break the news would be when all our family and loved ones were together, because she was less likely to make a scene in front of people who would judge her but who couldn’t help her career. In our family, a big get-together meant either holiday time or a bail hearing. (White-collar crimes, of course. What kind of people do you think we are?) And it was time for our annual Uncle Murray’s Parole Hearing Brunch.1 (Sadly, we’re looking at at least another five years of this tradition.) Everything was going great—the barbecued kosher pork was delicious, the touch football was fun, and all the kids were enjoying Murray teaching them how to make a shiv out of a corncob—when I leaned over to my mother and whispered in her ear, “Mom, I’m having a baby!” My mother dropped her shiv, hugged me, and said the words every daughter wants to hear: “Is it your husband’s? Is it white?” I said, “Yes,” and “yes,” and “You have to swear you won’t say a word to anybody.” She swore she’d keep it quiet, and we both started to cry.

  The next week, I started getting boxes of tiny clothing delivered to my house from her friends. I’m pretty sure they weren’t for me, as even at my thinnest, I wasn’t a Gap size 6–9 months.

  1 Okay, okay, I wasn’t at my Uncle Murray’s parole hearing (I don’t actually have an Uncle Murray, and if I did, he’d have a good enough lawyer he never would have served time for cooking someone’s books). I was in a dressing room at E! when I broke the news that I was pregnant. And FYI, even though much of my life took place at E!, conception did not.

  Too Soon?

  Comedy equals tragedy plus time.

  —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

  Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

  —MEL BROOKS

  My mother loved Mel Brooks. He’s funny and he’s fearless, just like she was. Mel and my mother had a lot in common—and not just that they were both Jewish, both from New York, and both slept with Anne Bancroft.1 They were kindred comedy spirits in that, for them, no subject was off-limits, no topic was too controversial, and no words went unspoken.

  Over the past twenty years or so, my mother and Mel Brooks and George Carlin2 used to speak out all the time that political correctness was killing comedy. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, one day everybody started getting offended by everything. Shrieks of outrage and horror would go up from the hypersensitive masses, who were wildly offended by some joke a comedian told. It drove my mother nuts. “People are always yelling, ‘You can’t say this and you can’t say that and, oh, you shouldn’t say that.’ You can’t use the C word, you can’t use the B word, you can’t use the N word—at this rate we’re only going to have two letters left. All I can say is, they’d better be F and U.”

  One of the things I learned from my mother was that good comedians push boundaries. She loved making her audiences squirm every now and again. In fact, I think the only thing she liked better than getting a huge laugh was getting an “oooh,” followed by a huge laugh. My mother once said that if a comedian worked for years and years and never offended anyone, then she hadn’t done her job. She pointed out that even Ellen DeGeneres, who’s known for having a very gentle, nonconfrontational stand-up act, had the courage to ruffle feathers when she came out as a lesbian on her old sitcom. The day that story broke, my mother said, “Good for Ellen; I’m proud of her. Do you think she’ll build me a bookcase?”

  I can’t tell you how often through the years the self-appointed PC police would rant and rave, “Oh, Joan Rivers crossed the line this time!” First off, who appointed these anonymous scolds to be in charge of political correctness? (Last time I checked, there was no cabinet post, Secretary of Shit You Shouldn’t Say Because You Might Offend Somebody. I’m pretty sure the First Amendment still covers comedians’ rights to tell jokes. As my mother used to say, “You don’t like the jokes, don’t come see me.”) Second, crossed what line? And third, who decides where that line is? The comedian decides, th
at’s who. When you go to a doctor, do you read the X-rays and prescribe treatment, or do you leave that to him because (a) it’s his job and (b) he’s the expert?

  My mother, like most great comics, knew where the line was. Yes, in the course of fifty years she crossed it occasionally, but she knew how far she could push the envelope. There are no hard-and-fast rules as to where the line is; it’s an internal mechanism, an instinct. And the line is different for each comic. My mother could get away with jokes other comedians couldn’t, and there are comedians who can get away with jokes she couldn’t. For example, she rarely, if ever, told jokes about politics. Politicians, yes; politics, no. If you think about it, there is a distinct difference. It’s not that she didn’t have opinions on politics; she did. But as she put it, “Melissa, I just can’t get away with telling jokes that are about politics, the same way Hillary Clinton can’t get away with telling people that she and Bill still get it on.”

  Back to the quote I opened this essay with: “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” The big question of course is, how much time? For my mother, the answer was usually “very little.” After my father committed suicide, despite my personal discomfort, the first night my mother was back onstage, his death was “in the act.” By 9/12 she was writing jokes about 9/11. Was that “too soon”? Maybe for some, but certainly not for the woman who came up to my mother after one of her first shows in New York after the attacks and said, “God bless you, Joan. You gave me permission to laugh again and smile again. Thank you.”

  When I began my career as a television producer, my mother gave me a great bit of advice: “Melissa, when it comes to comedy, you have to be like Lee Harvey Oswald. You can’t be afraid to pull the trigger.” I know what you’re thinking: “Lee Harvey Oswald? Too soon?”

  1 I have no idea if my mother slept with Anne Bancroft. Personally, I doubt it. I can’t imagine she would’ve cheated on Judi Dench. I just wrote that to see if it would offend people. I know it won’t offend Mel Brooks, which was my point.

  2 Before George Carlin and Mel Brooks there was Lenny Bruce, who broke down barriers so other comics could speak their minds freely. Today, comics such as Bill Maher, Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, Margaret Cho, and Louis C.K. are carrying on that tradition. And how can I not mention the funniest of them all, Sarah Palin, who makes us all laugh every time she opens her mouth.

  I Love You … or Not

  Joan Rivers’s jokes don’t bother me at all. She doesn’t hit me where I live.

  —ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  When I first began writing this book, my fabulous editor and I were having lunch and I casually mentioned that when it came to making jokes about celebrities, my mother actually liked the stars she poked fun at. My editor thought that would make for an interesting essay, and I agreed. Funny thing is, when I started writing it, I realized that what I was saying wasn’t all that true. My mother didn’t like all the stars she made fun of. In fact, she couldn’t stand a number of them, and many of them she didn’t even know.

  My mother was a comedian, not a poet or a social scientist. No matter what or who the subjects were, she was always looking for a punch line. She lived for the joke. In the 1970s she got a lot of press, both good and bad, for making fat jokes about Elizabeth Taylor. One night, when my mother was a guest on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson asked her if she felt bad about making all those fat jokes about La Liz. My mother said, “No. I’m not the one shoving the potatoes down her throat.”

  The truth is, my mother did like Elizabeth Taylor. Not only did they work tirelessly together for AIDS research, but they also shared a close personal friendship with actor Roddy McDowall. The other truth is that they weren’t all really Elizabeth Taylor jokes; a lot of them were just really good fat jokes that my mother attached to Elizabeth Taylor. Yes, some of them were Liz-specific: “Now that Elizabeth Taylor’s fat, she’s remaking a lot of her movies: Cat on a Hot Cross Bun, Butterball 8, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Ham?” But some of them—“She’s so fat that when she pierced her ears, gravy came out”—could have been applied to any “plus-size” star. When Elizabeth Taylor died, Kirstie Alley showed up in my mother’s act. And when Kirstie lost weight, Carnie Wilson came to the rescue. And after Carnie lost weight, Adele became the vehicle for the jokes.

  I think one of the reasons my mother loved fat jokes is because she was a fat child, and viewed herself like that for her entire life. (She told me once that in grade school the other kids used to taunt her with “Fat, fat the water rat,” so she figured if she beat them to the joke, it wouldn’t hurt her so much.)

  I can’t even count the number of jokes my mother told about Chaz Bono, yet she and Cher, Chaz’s mother, were always very good friends. Over the past few years, especially on Fashion Police, my mom must’ve told a million Kardashian jokes, yet she had a great relationship with the family and we all get along very well. (My mother thought Kris Jenner was one of the smartest women in show business. I swear I can hear her shouting from beyond, “No, no, Kris! Now’s not the time to leave Bruce, just as he’s transitioning. If you had stayed, you’d have doubled your wardrobe!”)

  I think my mother spent 80 percent of her free time writing jokes about Nicole Kidman—the field of play was so vast: Nicole’s tall, she’s pale, she’s rich, she’s beautiful, she’s Australian. Keith Urban’s a hottie. Tom Cruise is a—I’m saying nothing; he’s known for being beyond litigious. Anyway, you get my point. Then, one year, my mom winds up being seated next to Nicole Kidman at an awards show after party, and the next thing you know—surprise, surprise—they’re friends!

  It always annoyed my mother when she met the people she was poking fun at and ended up liking them.

  Lest you think I’m going to keep waxing on about all the stars my mother made fun of but liked, don’t worry, I’m not. This isn’t the OWN network, where every story has a positive, uplifting message.

  She didn’t like Jay Leno. Her reasons were both professional and personal. On the professional level, she didn’t think he was funny, and she felt that he’d ruined The Tonight Show. Comedically, she hated that not only did he water everything down to suit the lowest common denominator, but he telegraphed every single joke. There’s a running gag in comedy circles that one night Jay Leno was throwing paper airplanes into the audience and one of the planes hit an audience member in the eye. Someone yelled out, “This is the first time someone in Leno’s audience didn’t see it coming from a mile away.”

  Personally, my mother felt that it was unfair and deeply hurtful that Leno kept her off The Tonight Show for over twenty years for no good reason. After her death, Jay said he had banned my mother because he wanted to “honor Johnny’s wishes.” Hypocritical, to say the least, considering that Jay and his manager had had no trouble pushing not only Johnny out the door and off the NBC lot as fast as they could in 1992, but many of the longtime Tonight Show staffers as well. Wait, I stand corrected: Jay did have good reasons for keeping my mother off The Tonight Show all those years: first of all, she was funnier than he was; and second, he’s a coward. Apparently Jay’s cowardice has not abated since her death. This past December 10, eight weeks after my mother died, I was asked to speak at The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment breakfast, as my mother was one of their honorees. Jay had been booked to make the welcoming remarks, and before the event started, I found myself standing not five feet away from him. Not only did he not come over to offer his condolences, as any person with a heart would have done, but he wouldn’t even make eye contact with me, as any person with a spine would have done. It’s too bad; it could have been a healing moment for both of us.

  Although my mother respected Katie Couric as a journalist and a working mother, she didn’t like her style. We were guests on Katie’s short-lived daytime talk show, and rather than focusing on our reality series, which we were promoting, Katie instead went into attack mode. And when I say attack mode, I mean hammering my mother with questions along the lines of “Why are your jokes
so mean?” “Do you consider yourself a bully?” and “Isn’t it wrong to criticize other women?” etc., etc., etc.

  It got so contentious that I could feel my mother’s temperature rising, so I jumped in and started babbling about Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which my mother and I had recently written a column about for a magazine celebrating the book’s fiftieth anniversary. Katie then threw to commercial break and promoted the upcoming segment, which happened to be with Carson Kressley, about what food to serve at an Oscar party! Given the tone of our interview, I was surprised that the next segment wasn’t an undercover investigation of Gitmo.

  As some of you may remember, my mother had a daytime talk show that ran for many years, and for which she won an Emmy Award as Best Host. She knew better than anyone what makes for good daytime TV interviews. They’re fun, informative, and collegial. That doesn’t mean that tough topics can’t be broached, but the guests should be treated with an appropriate degree of respect. As every parent teaches his or her children, “It’s not always what you say, but how you say it.” (This is why Oprah was, and always will be, the master of daytime talk.) Apparently, Katie never watched Oprah.

  I’d like to write more about the people my mother didn’t like, but my lawyer is driving me crazy, texting me every five minutes, saying, MELISSA, PROMISE YOU WON’T WRITE ANYTHING ABOUT TOM CRUISE.