The Book of Joan Read online

  One of the best pieces of advice my mother gave me was always to be kind, polite, and gracious to airline personnel no matter how rude, surly, or incompetent they are, and no matter how horrible their service may be. She said, “Remember, they’re dealing with angry, disgruntled, miserable people. And then they leave home for work. Not only is your safety and well-being in their hands, but more important, so is your expensive designer luggage.” She always had a thoughtful word or compliment for everyone at the airline, from the ticket agent at the counter (“You look quite snappy in that starched cotton-poly blend, low-thread-count blouse”) to the pilot of the 747 (“I’ll bet you haven’t crashed one of these puppies in at least the last three weeks. Impressive!”). Her generosity of spirit was always appreciated, and we usually got great service. My mother once joked that if you were nice to the flight attendants on really turbulent, bumpy flights, they’d make sure you had beautiful, fur-lined vomit bags.

  My mother loved flight attendants. (One of her favorite books was the 1967 bestseller Coffee, Tea or Me, a funny look at the lives of stewardesses, as they were known in those days. Her two other favorite books were Helter Skelter and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which I’m sure says a lot about my mother—I just don’t know what, and don’t want to know.) My mother knew that flight attendants worked long hours, under difficult conditions, for very little money—all to make her travel experience a good one. She often referred to them as “the Saint Francises of the sky … except without the irritating begging and compulsive foot washing.” I think she felt that, as a comic, she and flight attendants were kindred spirits because they were both trying to provide the best service they could to their customers, sometimes under difficult conditions, and often unappreciated.

  She also maintained that we, as passengers, were actually spiritually connected to our flight attendants, and that “we are one,” because even though flight attendants always say that “safety is our first priority,” if the wings fall off the plane, we’re all going to go down and perish together. The only “safety” they might provide is putting the coffee carts away so we don’t get scalded before impact.

  With rare exceptions (Katie Couric, Jay Leno, Pocahontas, and Ramses II) my mother liked the people she poked fun of in her act (see this page),1 which is why, back in the day, stewardesses were such a staple of her shows. Here are some of my mom’s favorite flight attendant jokes:

  I was on a flight and the stewardess told me they lost my luggage. Then I see the pilot walk through the cabin wearing my dress.

  Stewardesses can be selfish. I said to one, “How do I get out if there’s a fire?” She said, “If you want to be the second one off, grab my ankles.”

  Stewardesses always give me a hard time. I asked one where my seat was and she said, “Two feet lower than when you were younger.”

  Stewardesses can be mean. I asked one for a blanket and she said, “Would you like some hay, too?”

  They’re such tramps. On most major airlines, the stewardess’s call button moans when you touch it.

  Stewardesses always come on to men. “Can I get you a blanket? Fluff your pillow? How about a drink?” And this is after they get off the plane.

  I asked a gay steward, “Exactly when did we leave the ground?” He said, “I don’t know about you, but for me it was 1979.”

  Flight attendants were not my mother’s only faves; she loved proctologists, too. But since this is a family book, I’m not going to give you a list of her favorite jokes on that topic.

  1 In hindsight, I think she hated more people than she liked. She had a fake flight manifest labeled “Death Flight 5000,” which had the names of all the people she hoped would be on board when the plane flew nose-first into K2. FYI, my name had been added to and scratched off her manifest so many times I could have filled the entire coach cabin myself.

  My mother said that flying coach was like being on a bus with wings. And doing it with children? Puh-leeze. Very few things—including sleep deprivation, explosive colitis, and IRS audits—are as unpleasant and harrowing as flying coach with a herd of young’uns. She was right. I know; I’ve done it. When Cooper was six or seven his school planned a class trip to Orlando, Florida, to Disneyworld. For almost an entire day I found myself wedged in a cabin of 112 first-graders in various stages of hysteria, excitement, fear, and ants-in-the-pantsiness. The last time I experienced that level of discomfort I was stuck in an elevator in Salt Lake City with a fundamentalist Mormon Amway dealer and his wives. The flight to Disneyworld was such unremitting torture that I expected to receive a sympathy card from Louis Zamperini. Given the circumstances, I couldn’t use my mother’s upgrade strategies: I couldn’t play the “widow card,” because all the other parents knew I wasn’t a widow; and I couldn’t offer up a lap dance to the pilot, or else Child Protective Services would be waiting for me when we touched down at the Happiest Place on Earth. It was my own damned fault. I had ignored my mother’s advice. I could have tried to give myself some breathing room by making sure that 23D remained vacant, but no, I had to be feisty and independent and disregard what I’d been taught and let whatever happened happen. I was an idiot. I should have listened to my mother when she said, “Melissa, if you want some ‘me space’ on the plane—and I don’t care who’s coming down the aisle; I don’t care if it’s a disabled vet or a nun with a puppy—if they try to plunk their ass down next to you, all you have to say is ‘I’m a bleeder’ or ‘Can you believe that I’ve never used toilet paper?’ or ‘Don’t worry about the sores; my doctor says once they’ve crusted over they’re no longer contagious.’ That seat will be emptier than a think tank in Mississippi.”

  Sex, Lies, and Videotape

  This is one of my mother’s early headshots and résumés. I’m not sure exactly what year it’s from, but I think she was on her second nose. I’m also not sure which credits were true and which projects were “in development” at this time—and by “in development,” I mean “totally made up.”1 Finally, I have no idea why she picked the name Joan Perry. It could have been that she thought Molinsky was too Jewish, or that Perry would fit better on a marquee. Of course, it’s also highly possible that she was married to someone named Perry and simply “forgot to mention it to me” over the course of the past forty-five years.

  I think a lot of my mother’s penchant for embellishment came as a result of being in show business. I’ve never met one actor or actress who, certainly in the beginning of their career, didn’t lie or pad a résumé. They had to, since most of them had day jobs as waiters—and serving waffles at IHOP isn’t going to help get you a role on The Young & the Restless.

  Her theory about lying on résumés? “Who really calls and checks?” She figured if she got caught, she’d just say, “I got cut from the movie” or “I wound up on the cutting room floor due to time.” She was the human Wikipedia; a lot of what was on her original résumés wasn’t true, but it sure sounded good.

  She once pointed out that Kurt Waldheim, former president of Austria and UN secretary general, never mentioned that he was a guard in a Nazi concentration camp. “Melissa, nowhere on Kurt Waldheim’s résumé does it say, ‘1938 to ’41: Gassed the Weinbergs.’ If he can lie on his résumé and become head of the UN, who’ll care that I didn’t really work with Brando?”

  1 What’s also interesting is that she failed to mention to me that she’d worked with Hitchcock!

  Death Be Not Loud

  The existence of death actually heightens life and makes it something to be savored every minute.

  —JOAN RIVERS

  From Mother to Daughter

  My mother had a lifelong obsession with death. I don’t mean a mild obsession. I mean a deep-seated, get-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night-with-heart-palpitations obsession, the kind that needs to be treated by a psychiatrist, not a psychologist (they can’t write prescriptions) or a social worker (they can’t even call a psychologist to get him to call a psychiatrist to write a prescription). She was obsessed with he
r death, my death, and random friends’ deaths—in short, everybody’s.

  When I was growing up, each morning before my father went to work and I went to school, we’d all sit in the kitchen having breakfast and my parents would read the newspaper. My father would read the business section, the main section, and the entertainment section. My mother would read the obituaries and the—wait. There’s no “and.” The obituaries were all she’d read. She was fascinated by who’d died, and how, and were there survivors, and was there a will, and had they left a nice apartment with a view that she could get a good deal on?

  She actually created a game we’d play at the table. It was a variation on the “if you eat your vegetables, I’ll put a piece of candy in your lunchbox” game. The payoff was the same, but the setup was different. My mother would read part of an obituary in the paper, and I’d have to guess facts about the deceased. For every fact I got right, I’d get a KitKat or a gummy bear. For example, she’d read, “ ‘Margaret Luanne Whiteman, eighty-seven. Spent sixty years volunteering at the local women’s Rotary Club. Had nine children and fourteen grandchildren.’ What do we know about Maggie?” The answers of course were: (1) she’s from the Midwest or the South, because no East or West Coast city person would name a child Luanne; and (2) she’s not Jewish, because Jews don’t do Rotary Clubs or have nine children. (“Think of the stretch marks!”) She stopped playing the game when I was twelve because I’d gotten so good at it she was afraid I’d develop diabetes.

  Most parents send their children off to school with little bromides like “Have a great day! I can’t wait to see you later!” or “Do your best at school today. We’re having your favorite pizza for dinner tonight!” My mother would send me off with “Enjoy yourself. We could all be dead tomorrow.” How uplifting. (Things didn’t change over time, either. As recently as last year we had exchanges like “Melissa, do you have supplies in the house, so when disaster strikes or the terrorists land on the beach in Malibu, you’re prepared?” “Mom, what are the odds terrorists are coming to Malibu?” “You never know. They could have boats.”)

  I never fully understood her death obsession because I’m, well, normal. The things I obsess about tend to fall within normal parameters, i.e., work, Cooper, school, and the size of my ass.

  When I was in high school I asked her why she was so worried about death. She said, “I just want to make sure that when Daddy or I die, the insurance companies don’t fuck you.”

  I said, “Really, that’s where your mind goes?” She said, “Yes, of course. Doesn’t everyone’s?”

  Well, probably not everyone’s, but I guess my father’s mind went there, too. Yet, unlike my mother, he wasn’t worried about terrorists washing up on shore, or Armageddon. He was worried about what happened afterward—and sadly, with good reason.

  Unbeknownst to us, before he committed suicide, he had our estate and finances planned, not only for that moment in time but for the future as well, so that in either of our lifetimes, there would never be a trap door we could fall through. He literally laid out for us how to deal with, handle, and manage both our business and family finances. He was meticulous and precise, and dotted every i and crossed every t. And thank God he did, because after he died, my mother was at a total loss. She had no idea what to do or where to turn. My father had run the business; all she had had to do was be funny. She had no clue about finances or mortgages or college funds; she didn’t even know where he kept the house keys. In spite of the fact that she was a world-famous celebrity, there was an old-fashioned underpinning to their real relationship, and at home her job wasn’t to be Joan Rivers; her job was to be Mrs. Rosenberg, and Melissa’s mom.

  As devastating an event as my father’s death was, years later I discovered I’d taken something positive away from it. After Cooper was born, it became time for me to draw up my first will. When it was finished, it turned out to be a virtual copy of the plan my father had set out for my mother and me.

  My father’s plan (implemented by Michael Karlin, who has been our business manager for thirty years—and is Cooper’s godfather) helped in many ways, particularly when my mother was left to her own devices. Here’s an example: For as long as I can remember, once a week she would be given petty cash by her assistant, who had withdrawn it from the bank, so she wouldn’t be walking around with just a credit card and a wallet full of ones. My mother would take the cash, put half in her pocket, and stash the other half in drawers and other secret hiding places in her bedroom. She would do this for weeks and weeks on end. (Sometimes, just to cheer herself up, she would lock herself in her room with the stash and count it!) Then, when she had hidden away enough, she would go purchase something (shoes, fur coat, diamond necklace, etc.) that “Michael Karlin can’t stop me from buying, or tell me I can’t afford! He doesn’t have to know.”

  Once, after one of her clandestine shopping sprees, Michael called and asked me a question he’d been dying to ask since my father passed away: “Does your mother realize that I still know exactly how much she spends and how much she hides because the cash she withdrew came from her account, and I run the account? I’ve been aware of this game for years, but I know it makes her happy to think she’s getting away with something, so I let her sneak around and squirrel and spend.”

  Knowing that this was her way of operating when it came to money, after she died I had to shake out every book, magazine, and folder; look for false-bottom drawers; unscrew aerosol cans and dig through cereal boxes, looking for cash she had secreted away. I think the grand total of what I uncovered was four hundred seventy-three dollars, mostly in fives and ones, and the occasional crumpled-up twenty. I’ve saved that stash, and on her birthday I’m going to go out and buy something fancy and not tell Michael Karlin.

  “Here’s Johnny … !”

  In 1965 my mother made her first appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. She was so funny that, at the end of her segment, Johnny said to her, on the air, “You’re going to be a star.”

  Back then the entertainment world was very different—Egads! No cell phones?—and there was no such thing as an “overnight success.” Up until the creation of YouTube (e.g., Justin Bieber) and the mass-marketing of sex tapes (Do I have to tell you?), performers who got a big break had put in years and years of work before they became “overnight sensations.” My mother once said, “Up until social media the only way to become a household name overnight was to kill your parents. No one ever heard of Lyle and Erik Menendez until they had a bad Tuesday and got a little annoyed with Mom and Dad. Then suddenly—BOOM! The next morning, they’re the most famous couple since Sonny and Cher.”

  It took my mother years to become an overnight sensation. She auditioned for The Tonight Show seven times and was rejected by the bookers seven times. One night a comedian who shall remain nameless—I’m not protecting him; I just don’t know who it was—was on The Tonight Show and bombed as bad as Hiroshima. Bill Cosby, who had just become one of Johnny’s favorite guests (and had started out with my mother), watched the show that night and called the bookers and said, “You’ll book that guy, but you won’t book Joan? How much worse could she possibly do?” So they relented and booked her. In those days there were only three television networks, and everybody watched The Tonight Show. When you appeared on it, you became instantly recognizable, especially if you did well. My mother told me that the day after she did The Tonight Show, she went to the bank and asked them to hold a check she couldn’t cover. The teller, who had obviously seen her on TV the night before, said, “Don’t worry, Miss Rivers. We know you’re good for it.”

  The second big thing that came out of her first appearance on The Tonight Show was my father. Edgar Alfred Rosenberg was a producer in New York and was looking for a writer to punch up the script for a movie he was producing. A friend of his suggested this funny girl he had just seen on The Tonight Show. As fate would have it, my mother was working in town that night, so my father and his friends went down to the Villag
e to see her perform at the Bitter End. He liked what he saw, and set up a meeting. Apparently the meeting went well. Not only did he hire her, but five days later he married her! Clearly my father was the original multitasker.

  I know what you’re thinking: Five days? Who gets married after five days? That’s what I thought, too, once I was old enough to realize that “speed engagements” weren’t normal. I must’ve been around fifteen, and we were all having breakfast at home one morning when I decided to bring the subject up with my parents. I was chatting with my mother—my father was trying to ignore us, as any man with a belligerent teenage daughter does—and I asked her, “Why did you and Daddy get married so fast? Were you pregnant? Is there an older sibling I don’t know about?” She put down her bagel and said, “Melissa, we just knew. It wasn’t love at first sight for either of us. There were no fireworks or lightning bolts. It wasn’t some great romance like Hepburn and Tracy. We both just knew. We had the same sense of humor, the same values, and we wanted the same things out of life. And if you ever try and run off and get married in five days your father will kill you.”

  Back to business. Let’s review:

  1. Johnny gave my mother her big career break.

  2. Because she was on The Tonight Show, she met my father.

  3. Because she met my father, she had me.

  4. Because she had me, you’re reading this book.

  How do you say thank you to someone who’s responsible for all that? Nine months after I was born, my parents came up with the perfect thank-you gift. For Johnny’s birthday they dressed me up and had the nanny hand-deliver me to The Tonight Show offices. They’d attached a note that read, “We wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done for us, so we’ve sent you our most prized possession, our daughter, Melissa. FYI, she doesn’t like Brussels sprouts; they make her windy.”