Not surprisingly, once again, she won.
* * *
“Melissa, dealing with an insurance company is like having sex with Jackie Chan. You’re probably not going to get much.”
Not Under My Roof
Usually when my mother came to Los Angeles to work or visit, she lived with me in my home. I expected she would follow the rules I had in place in my house—just as I was expected to follow the rules she had in place when I was in her house. (Who among us hasn’t heard, or said, “When you’re living under my roof you’ll do as I say?”)
Naturally, I was wrong. Even though my mother raised me to be a good guest, she was anything but. Basically, she ignored the rules she didn’t like, which was a little disturbing because there weren’t that many of them, and most of them were safety-oriented, not quality-of-life issues. (To the bitter end she insisted on running with scissors.) Obviously I didn’t have to worry about her bringing strange men home, or doing drugs with her friends—is there such a thing as a Lipitorklatsch?—or turning the garage into a hookah lounge. I also didn’t have to worry about her making a mess, because she was an anal-retentive clean freak. Seriously, my rules were really incredibly basic.
For example, one of them was “Do not feed the dogs from the table.” She apparently had trouble with the word not. She was constantly feeding my dogs, Mike and Lola, from the table. My issue wasn’t with her giving them snacks; it was the location of the snack giving. All I asked her to do, when she felt compelled to share her egg salad sandwich with them, was to put it in their bowls—not a huge request. One day I walked in and there she was, with the refrigerator door open, feeding them and herself leftover Chinese food. When I reminded her that she had promised not to do that, she said, “You only said not to feed them from the table. This is the refrigerator.”
When she wasn’t feeding them directly, she sometimes “accidentally” left food out where they could get it, like in her purse. Open. On the floor. Mike and Lola must’ve looked at her as a buffet with feet. Mike once finished the remnants of a honey-glazed ham that my mother had taken from the craft service table at E! It got to the point where I was terrified to leave them alone in the kitchen with her. Every week, when she was at my house, not only did each dog gain two pounds, but their insulin levels spiked dangerously. At one point I asked my mother why she insisted on turning my dogs into “Before” photos for Weight Watchers. She said, “They both have been fixed, have no sex life, so the only joy they have left in life is to eat.”
Another rule that she chose to disregard was Cooper’s bedtime. It didn’t matter if I was home or not; when my mother was in the house, come 8:45, without fail, both of them would disappear. It didn’t take Olivia Benson to figure out where they were, which was usually in my mother’s room, eating some sort of sugary snack (that the dogs seemed to be enjoying as well) while deeply engrossed in something on TV. At 9:15, I would go downstairs and tell everyone it was time to wrap it up and that Cooper had to go to bed. I’d go back upstairs assuming that my mother would send him up to bed. Thirty minutes later I’d go into his room to say good night—no Cooper. So back downstairs I’d go. “Guys, c’mon. I’m not kidding. You’ve got school tomorrow.” They’d both just launch into “Can’t we just finish this episode? Frasier and Niles have decided to open a restaurant.” When I said no, my mother would start in with “How often do I get to spend time alone with my grandson?” I’d reply, “Every week! Please, he has to go to bed or he’s going to be a nightmare in the morning.” She’d say, “No, he won’t. Cooper, promise your mother you won’t be cranky in the morning.” Cooper would look up and say, with a mouthful of cookies and ice cream, “I pe9tjtn” (translation: “I promise”), and she’d say, “I swear I’ll get him up to bed as soon as the show is over. Go to bed. You’re looking very tired; don’t worry, I’ve got this.”
The next morning, when Cooper stomped out of the house exhausted and in a foul mood, my mother would look at me and say, “You know, Melissa, you really need to make sure he gets more sleep.”
Forty Is the New Fifty
The five scariest words that ever came out of my mother’s mouth were “Melissa, get in the car.”
There were very few things in this world more frightening than being in a car when my mother was behind the wheel, and that includes skydiving, swimming with sharks, and drawing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
My mother was a terrible driver. I don’t mean bad like “Hey, you’re parked too far away from the curb.” I mean like “Hey, you’re parked too close to the couch.” She must’ve taken driving lessons from Mr. Magoo. In her hands a car wasn’t a means of transportation; it was a weapon of mass destruction. If the president really wanted to end the war in Afghanistan, he should have sent her over there to take a nice, leisurely drive. They’d have been waving the white flags in half an hour.
How bad a driver was she? You know how sometimes when you’re driving on the freeway and, all of a sudden, thousands of cars start slowing down to a crawl and then stop for no apparent reason? She was the reason.
She believed that forty miles per hour was the appropriate speed for anywhere: driveway, school zone, left lane of the highway. Sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow—didn’t matter. Her foot applied the same pressure on the gas pedal all the time. It was as if her right leg were bionic and was being controlled by remote control in a secure location by anti-American forces intent on destroying our economy by making sure everyone was late for work. One time we were driving on the freeway—I must have been ten or eleven, too young to drive—and she was in the left lane going, oh, I don’t know, let’s say forty miles an hour. Cars were honking at us and drivers were rolling down their windows and screaming and giving us the finger. I said, “Mom, don’t you think you should go a little faster? All those people might be in a hurry and have something important to do.” She said, “They have something important to do? We all have important things to do. So they’re five minutes late.”
She also had no problem driving with the hazard lights on. In fairness, she probably didn’t know how to turn them off and had probably accidentally turned them on at some point, when she was fidgeting with the mirror to put on her makeup. When I explained that they might cause an accident she said, “Don’t be ridiculous. I use them as a deterrent; that way people stay out of my way.”
She also thought the lane lines were just for her. She felt that if you lined up the car’s hood ornament with the lines on the road it was safer because that way you had plenty of clearance on either side. (That’s why she always liked Mercedes; not because they were beautiful, fancy cars, but because they had huge hood ornaments that she used to line up the car with the road.) This was particularly frightening on two-lane streets. One day, when I was hanging on to the door, white-knuckled, she said, “Oh, Melissa, relax. Don’t worry. They’ll see me coming.”
Temperature control was also an issue. She was always cold, so even if she felt the tiniest bit chilly, she’d put the car’s heat on to blast furnace levels. I’ll never forget the summer day she was driving me and a couple of my friends home from the movies. It must’ve been ninety degrees outside, yet she had the temperature in the car set at a balmy ninety-five. As she drove down the freeway, we were all hanging our heads out the car windows like dogs, panting for fresh air. When I complained about the heat, she said, “Don’t worry; we’ll be home soon.” I said, “No, we won’t. You’re only going forty.”
In California, where I grew up, it’s state law that you have to take driver’s education classes in order to earn a driver’s license. So when I was fifteen, and trying to get my learner’s permit, my mother took me out to practice driving. Once. The way she did it was, she would drive down the block and back, and then it would be my turn to do the exact same thing. She’d pick a quiet residential street in a senior citizen neighborhood for our practice runs. “I don’t want you to be driving where there are a lot of little children around. God forbid you hit one of the
m. We’d get sued and Daddy would have to go back to being an accountant. If you hit an old lady, who cares? She’s probably waiting for the hearse anyway. Tick tock.” When she was showing me how to parallel-park, she kept banging into the cars in front and back of us. I said, “Mom, you’re hitting those cars!” She said, “That’s why they call them bumpers.” From that day forward, my father took me for driving practice.
Through the years one would think her driving skills would have improved accidentally, just by dint of living in LA and having to drive so much. But that wasn’t the case. The more she drove, the worse she got, if that’s even possible. Thankfully as she got older she could afford a driver, thereby making the world a safer place. (Again with the giving!)
Note: I was always very clear that she was not allowed to drive Cooper anywhere. However, it’s entirely possible she did when I was out of town, and bought his silence with candy, toys, and cash.
Pillow Talk
My mother loved to do needlepoint. She said it calmed her down. She’d get in bed, turn the TV on to Investigation Discovery to watch some dark tale about a gruesome murder, pull out her needles, and start sewing. How calming.
She liked to needlepoint pillows that had sayings on them that were either poignant or funny, or that had some special meaning to our family. Here are some of the actual slogans from her pillows:
Don’t Expect Praise Without Envy Until You’re Dead.
Birds Only Peck at the Best Fruit.
Welcome to Joan and Melissa’s Excellent Adventure.
I Need a Man to Spoil Me or I Don’t Need a Man at All.
I’d Rather Be Me with Only Ten Million Dollars and a Lot of Friends Than Him with Forty Million Dollars and No Friends.
Glamour Has No Alarm Clock. Fashion Knows No Pain.
Go Through Any Door That Opens. You Don’t Know Where It’s Going to Lead You.
Say “Yes” to Everything!
Given her penchant for needlepointing while watching crime shows, I was always surprised she didn’t have a pillow that read, PLACE THIS PILLOW OVER VICTIM’S FACE FOR 8½ MINUTES, APPLYING GENTLE PRESSURE. THERE WILL BE NO PETECHIAL HEMORRHAGING AND NO ONE WILL KNOW YOU DID IT.
I’ve Got a Secret
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by the American government for spilling secrets; the American people turned Joan Molinsky Rosenberg into a star for doing the same thing. Okay, not the exact same thing. Julius and Ethel gave atomic secrets to the Soviets in 1944. My mother blabbed about Elizabeth Taylor on The Tonight Show. Which bit of tattling had a bigger impact on the world? Most people today couldn’t pick Julius and Ethel’s photos out of a police lineup, but just last year my mother sold out arenas from England to Australia. You be the judge.
While my mother had an insatiable need to know all the gossip, you couldn’t tell her any because she couldn’t keep a secret to save her life. For example, there was one time at Fashion Police when one of my mom’s cohosts was having contract problems. (I will not tell you which one, and you’ll see why as you keep reading.) My mother, being the “newshound” she was, wanted to know everything going on in everyone’s lives at the show. As executive producer, I was privy to a lot of things, both professional and personal, that were, quite frankly, none of my mother’s business. At least twice a week I would catch her lingering outside my office door, eavesdropping while I was on a call. When I hung up, she’d say, “Hey, I happened to be passing by your office—repeatedly, while you were on the phone—and I was curious: what was that about?” If I did not produce some sort of satisfying nugget for her, she would badger me until I just couldn’t take it anymore. Sometimes I just made shit up to get her to leave me alone. That way, we were both happy: she felt that she was in the know, and I had some peace.
Back to the story. After one of the tapings, I met behind closed doors with said cohost. Nancy Drew figured out that if the door was shut, something important was being discussed. As soon as my meeting was over and I was back with my mom, the Inquisition began.
She’d badger me and badger me and badger me and badger me: “What was that about? What’s going on? Is this big news? If it is, it’s important that I know. As you know, I will be asked at the airport!” I told her, “Mom, number one, this is not huge news. Neil Armstrong landing on the moon was huge news. The Navy SEALs killing Osama bin Laden was huge news. This is nothing. Number two, and more important, I can’t say anything. I’m the executive producer, and the cast and crew have to trust me and know that their confidences are safe.” She said, “Missy, they do trust you, which is why you can tell me. I’m your mother. No one would ever fault you for telling your mother.” Again I said no—clearly not the answer she wanted. She didn’t see it as the end of the conversation; she saw it as a challenge, and she kept going and going and going. You’d think after all those years, I’d have been immune to her tactics, but you’d be wrong. The woman was a professional, grade-A, top-of-the-line, best-of-the-best master manipulator. After a good amount of time she just wore me down, like a suspect in the twentieth hour of a police interrogation who’s willing to confess to a crime he didn’t commit, just to be able to go home.
I said, “Mom, you must swear on all that’s good and decent that you promise to never, ever, ever say a word about this to anyone. I’m serious. This is confidential stuff.” She said, “Of course not. My lips are sealed. I won’t say a word to anyone!” So, like a fool, I told her. We left her dressing room and within sixty seconds (and I’m being generous in the time here) we ran into the cohost in question in the elevator and my mother says, without missing a beat, “I can fix your contract issues,” and for the length of time it took us to travel from the lobby to parking level P1, she proceeded to give detailed advice on how to solve this person’s problem. We were in the parking lot and the stunned said cast member mumbled, “Thank you,” and scurried off to the left as we headed to the right. Furious, I said to my mother, “You swore you wouldn’t say anything. Do you know that now I’m in trouble, as is the person who told me details even I wasn’t supposed to know? I can’t believe you just did that!” Her reply? “Well, then you shouldn’t have told me.”
Her idea of keeping a secret was not what you or I would consider keeping a secret. She thought there was no problem sharing a story about someone as long as the person she was sharing it with had no affiliation with the person the story was about. For example, if I told her that one of my neighbors was having an affair with a very married executive at ABC, she’d make sure that she shared this bit of information only with people who worked at CBS, NBC, Fox, and Showtime … and maybe Netflix. (Her other default mode was “I only told Margie, and who’s she gonna tell? She runs a nonprofit. Do you think the orphans she’s helping really care that your friend Tina is banging one of the network’s CEOs? I don’t think so.” Frighteningly, there is some logic to that.)
I think part of my mom’s blabbiness had to do with the fact that she never had any secrets or skeletons in her own closet. (There was probably no room in there, what with all the Chanel and Valentino suits and millions of QVC trinkets, scarves, and schmattas.) Everything in her life was open for public discussion and debate—from my father’s death to Cooper’s birth, from her first nose to her last chin, from her being blackballed by Johnny Carson to her redemption on Celebrity Apprentice—so I guess she figured everything in everyone else’s life was open for discussion, too.
I constantly begged her to dial it down and keep some things private. I said, “Mom, be a well, not a fountain,” yet she went off more frequently than Old Faithful.
Customer Disservice
A lot of people don’t suffer fools gladly. My mother didn’t suffer them at all. One of her biggest pet peeves was incompetence (and incontinence; more on that later). People who were bad at their jobs, or didn’t care that they were bad at their jobs, drove her crazy. In the United States there is, ironically, a strange phenomenon that many of these people end up working in service-oriented fields.1 She
couldn’t fathom how people who were bad at their jobs not only got those jobs, but kept them—excluding, of course, the twenty-year-old blonde secretaries with mad oral skills. She knew how they got where they were: on their knees. (“Melissa, the road to success is covered with rug burns.”)
In December of 2013, while on vacation in Mexico, I bought my mother a diary, which became the genesis of her book Diary of a Mad Diva. One of her first entries was about a series of phone calls she had with AT&T while we were in Mexico, regarding their failure to properly put her on the international calling plan she had asked and paid for. Needless to say, the entry was hilarious, but the actual experience was infuriating. She must’ve been on the phone—mine, not hers; her phone wasn’t working, remember?—for three hours, with five different representatives, trying to get the matter resolved. Call after call, back and forth, over and over again, until the problem got fixed. When it was finally resolved, she said, “How is this possible? They’re the phone company and they can’t fix a phone problem they created? What the fuck is going on here? What kind of morons are they hiring? And where the fuck is my assistant, who should have been dealing with this?”
The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation Page 14
