Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
My mother the big mouth ... but she never blabbed about her chum Charles
Melissa Rivers reveals how her late mother Joan’s wicked jokes had the prince in stitches. By Lina Das
For many fans of the Oscars, the highlight of the annual Hollywood bash used to be not the overload of wealth and glamour, but Joan Rivers’s hilariously irreverent interviews on the red carpet that preceded the ceremony. Who can forget Nicole Kidman’s frock in 1997, a green Dior showstopper. ‘Nicole!’ Joan’s voice rang out above the crowds. ‘Tell me why you wore such an ugly colour! I hate it. You’re making me puke.’
And on her TV show Fashion Police, Joan turned discussions of what stars were wearing at events into a side-splitting war of words. She admitted she knew nothing about fashion. ‘But I know what I like, and that’s what fashion is really about. I don’t care what those snobby people think.’
Joan, who despite her razor-sharp tongue had a warmth that won her a legion of friends – Prince Charles and Camilla among them – died unexpectedly in September 2014, though in death as in life she was a one-off. The comedienne who made her name skewering the vanities of the rich and famous (‘Madonna has just lost 30lb. She shaved her legs’) was having a routine throat procedure at a clinic in New York, but after complications developed she was put into a medically induced coma and died a week later aged 81. Her daughter Melissa was by her side the entire seven days and although her mother never regained consciousness, Melissa arranged for all of Joan’s friends and family to pay their final respects.
‘I did the only thing I could,’ says Melissa. ‘I had her hair and make-up people do her before everyone came to say their goodbyes. I also put her in her favourite red and gold kaftan. I didn’t put her in her comfy housecoat because she would have been so annoyed. Do you think I was going to let people see her without her looking her best? I would have been struck by lightning.’
The delivery, you can’t help but notice, is quintessentially Rivers. Mother and daughter were extremely close and shared everything from their petite frames and sharp wit to their ability to use humour to deal with difficult situations. Just three months after Melissa’s father, Joan’s husband Edgar Rosenberg, committed suicide in 1987, Joan
went on stage and joked he’d killed himself ‘ because while we were making love, I took the bag off my head’.
Humour has been the family’s lifeblood ever since Joan started making a name for herself in the 60s. She worked right up until the end and just days before she died was hosting Fashion Police, which finally went off air last November after 22 years. Joan’s zingers on the show were legendary. Of Rihanna’s risqué 2012 Grammy Award outfit, for instance, she remarked, ‘that neckline is plunging faster than Aretha Franklin’s head into a bucket of fried chicken’.
Melissa took over as host of Fashion Police after her mother’s death and since it ended has spent her time compiling a book of the photos, joke cards and correspondence her mother had collected over the years. Entitled Joan Rivers Confidential, it’s a compelling scrapbook of her mother’s life. ‘A funny woman who kept everything, and God that woman had a lot of s**t,’ Melissa laughs. ‘Of course it was hard going through all her stuff. Seeing pictures of her and my son as well as going through my dad’s stuff was difficult.’
Melissa, 50, is no-nonsense like her mother, but losing both parents so suddenly has clearly affected her. Joan’s death, it turns out, could have been avoided. Doctors at the clinic where she’d gone for the procedure, Yorkville Endoscopy, made a series of errors including failing to spot her blood pressure and pulse had dropped markedly. One of the most damning allegations was that one of the doctors took a photo of her on his phone while she was unconscious. Melissa filed a malpractice suit against the clinic, and the case was settled in 2016 for an undisclosed sum.
‘It shouldn’t have happened to my mother,’ she says. ‘But I went through the whole suicide thing with my father and I had to learn to manage my anger. So I realise you can’t live with anger. It will eat you alive.’ Joan’s funeral in September 2014 brought out a plethora of celebrities including the not-yet president Donald Trump. Two of her most famous chums, however, Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, were absent. ‘But they put out a lovely statement when she died,’ says Melissa. In it they praised Joan’s ‘enormous zest for life’. Melissa has since scattered some of her mother’s ashes in locations including Paris, Mexico and the lobby of London’s Ritz hotel. ‘I might write to Prince Charles and ask if I can scatter them at Highgrove too,’ she says now.
Joan’s unlikely friendship with Charles and Camilla began when they were introduced by a mutual friend in 2003 during a painting holiday in the South of France, and Joan was invited to their wedding reception two years later. ‘One of only four Americans on the list,’ as she’d proudly say. ‘She adored them. It was a true friendship,’ says Melissa. ‘She told me she was at a dinner with them once and Charles turned to her and said, “Get up and say something”. My mother was a real preparer – she didn’t like to do things off the cuff – so she said, “Excuse me, I’m not being rude”, and took out a piece of paper and started making notes. Then she got the idea to stuff all the silverware down her dress so while she was walking and talking it would fall out like she’d stolen it all. They loved it.’
Another time, a mutual friend, who was older, did something rather embarrassing at a very formal dinner party in New York. Later, my mother was at a reception for Charles and Camilla in London and told them the story but wouldn’t tell them who the person was. They spent the whole time going through the receiving line and mouthing to my mother, “Is it him? Is it him?” and wouldn’t stop giggling.’
Their friendship must have delighted Joan, who was a raging Anglophile. In the 70s when her career took off, the family moved to LA and enjoyed a Downton Abbey-esque lifestyle complete with butlers and even a governess. Their chums included actors Roddy McDowall and Sybil Christopher, exwife of Richard Burton. ‘My parents gravitated towards the British acting community as it was more intellectual and made them feel more comfortable.’
Writer Jackie Collins and her sister Joan were also good friends. Joan Collins would often be the butt of the other Joan’s jokes, but could give as good as she got. Joan Rivers once asked her, ‘Besides your husband, who’s the best man you’ve ever been in bed with?’ Joan Collins replied, ‘Your husband.’ Joan Rivers trumped that, ‘Funny, he didn’t say the same about you.’
Elizabeth Taylor also found herself on the receiving end of Joan’s caustic wit. ‘She’s so fat, her fishnet stockings can catch trout,’ said Joan. While her comedy was tough on others, it was always toughest on Joan herself and with her famed love of cosmetic surgery (‘My face has been tucked in more times than a bed sheet at the Holiday Inn’), one wonders if she ever loved herself as much as her fans clearly did. ‘I think she did at the end,’ says Melissa. ‘She’d always hated her body, but one day she looked in the mirror and said, “I look pretty good for 80”. ‘I feel the void she left, rather than feeling her around me. She was such a life force and now that’s gone. She was my best friend. I miss having her to talk to about my son being a teenager, but I hear her voice in my head all the time.’ And with that impeccable Rivers timing, Melissa adds, ‘Actually, maybe I hear it a little too much.’
Joan Rivers Confidential by Melissa Rivers and Scott Currie (Abrams, £30). Live From The Red Carpet: Grammy Awards, tomorrow, 10.30pm, E!.
That neckline is plunging faster than Aretha Franklin’s head into a bucket of fried chicken JOAN RIVERS