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

by Melissa Rivers

• Google him before you do him. No sane woman wants to have toe-curling, I’ve-already-fallen-in-love-with-you sex with a man only to find out later that he’s got wives and families in nine different states or is wanted by the FBI, CIA, Interpol, and ISIS.

  1 More of my mother’s dating tips on the next page!

  * * *

  My mother read somewhere that you will have five great loves in your life, so if one of them breaks up with you, it’s not a great loss. Then she added, “Unless it’s breakup number five, and then you’re fucked and you face a future of lesbianism, religion, or D batteries.”

  Everybody’s Talking … About Everybody Else

  When my mother wasn’t quoting the world’s greatest philosophers, writers, doctors, and scientists, she’d be quoting the only people she held in even higher esteem: gossip columnists. She’d been a close friend of the New York Post’s Cindy Adams since the day they first met, in 1847. She had a great relationship with Liz Smith, and was friends with everybody at TMZ, Radar Online, Perez Hilton, etc.1

  My mother hated the term gossip columnist. She found it pejorative, much like the terms Soviet dissident and radical feminist. (She much preferred pissy Russki and single woman.) She believed that if the public had an interest in the subject matter, then it wasn’t gossip; it was news.

  “Melissa, I don’t think of celebrity reporting as mindless gossip. I think of it as a healthy exchange of information about people who influence our thinking and effect change in the world; people who make our lives fuller and richer; people like Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg and two-thirds of One Direction.”

  One of her favorite columnists of all time was Maxine Mesinger of the Houston Chronicle. Maxine was the Walter Winchell of the West; she had enough clout to help make or break a young career. My mother once said, “Maxine Mesinger can give you Texas.” She and my mother became fast friends from the moment they met, and not just because Maxine had power (although, God knows, it didn’t hurt). She was a southern belle, smart as a whip, and hilariously funny. My mother spoke about Maxine the way lepers spoke about Jesus, in terms so glowing I imagined Maxine kicking off her heels and walking on water. (Not that there’s any water in Houston—the place is completely landlocked and a thousand degrees. Last time I was there, the only water I saw were the puddles of sweat falling off me as I swatted away flies and mosquitoes.) My mother cited Maxine often, but one quote—having nothing to do with celebrity—stands out above all others. Shortly after I’d graduated from college and was getting ready to embark on my professional life, my mom sat me down and, with a tear in her eye, said, “Honey, always remember what the most important thing your auntie Maxine said: ‘Sweetheart, pussy pulls freight trains.’ ” There’s some maternal advice for you.2

  1 The irony in my mother’s love of gossip columnists is the fact that she rarely, if ever, read things written about her. She had this steadfast rule that if a reporter or a blogger or some other random media type said or wrote something nasty about her, unless it was absolutely imperative, no one was allowed to tell her about it. “Melissa, I don’t need to hear strangers say terrible things about me; that’s why I have family.” I get it. While I don’t believe that ignorance is bliss (I’m not in Congress, after all), I also don’t believe in getting my feelings hurt unnecessarily—which means even though I hope you really enjoy this book, if you don’t, my feelings won’t be hurt, because I won’t know about it. I have this steadfast rule …

  2 Writing this paragraph reminds me of the time my elementary school showed the movie The Ten Commandments on one of our monthly film nights. I liked the movie but two things stuck out. 1) Moses was Jewish; why was Charlton Heston cast to play him? Was Paul Newman unavailable? Was Tony Curtis doing dinner theater in Phoenix? 2) I didn’t understand commandment number ten, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.” When I got home from school, I asked my mother what that meant, and she said, “It means don’t fuck your neighbor’s wife and steal their sheep”—or maybe she said, “Don’t fuck their sheep and steal their wife”; it’s been a while so I’m paraphrasing, but I do know that I said, “Mr. and Mrs. Fleckman don’t have a sheep.”

  * * *

  My mother may have had few boundaries and lived a very public life, but she knew where to draw the line. You never saw a photo of her in a tabloid getting freaky wit’ her baby daddy.

  She never understood why actors and celebrities were always caught “canoodling” in some restaurant. (FYI, canoodling is a tabloid word meaning “making out,” and is not to be confused with cornholing, which is a southern word meaning “be nice to your cousins.”)

  “Missy, I don’t understand why celebrities think it’s okay to make out in restaurants and theaters. It’s a public place. Who else behaves like this? Did you ever see a chiropractor sucking his wife’s toes in a Taco Bell? I think not.”

  “I Want to Live Forever …”

  My mother hated the kids on the network television show Fame,1 which was based on (and which featured some of the kids from) the big hit movie Fame. (Okay, she didn’t really hate them; she just couldn’t figure out why they were all thirty-five years old and still in high school. It was her belief that if you were in high school at thirty-five you must’ve been one of two things: you were either a Cuban playing baseball with a fake birth certificate or you were left back seventeen times, in which case you shouldn’t be in high school; you should be in The Guinness Book of World Records as “the world’s stupidest person.” That belief came honestly. She often told me stories about a guy she knew in high school named Marvin Lee. Marvin was a star football player who spent a really, really long time in high school. And by “really, really long time,” I mean every day was father-son day at school, because Marvin had been there so long that he and his son were in the same grade. My mother put it very succinctly when she said, “Melissa, Marvin Lee was in high school for so many years they eventually just made him security.”)

  While my mom may not have liked the kids on Fame, she loved fame and she loved being famous. She was once asked on The View, “What’s the downside of being famous?” She said, “None. There is no downside to being famous. It’s all great!”

  As far back as I can remember, my mother was always gracious to her fans. She signed every autograph and took every photo fans asked for. When I was about thirteen, my mother had two weekend performances at a theater in Chicago. One Saturday afternoon we decided to go shopping on Michigan Avenue. Every twenty feet, fans approached my mother, and she stopped and talked to every single one of them. After about an hour of this, we still hadn’t gotten close to a store. My father leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I think we ought to make a movie about your mother walking down the street. We’ll call it Around the Block in Eighty Days.”

  There were a lot of benefits to growing up with a famous parent, and not just the financial ones. Our family rarely, if ever, had to wait on lines to get into a movie or a play or a concert. At restaurants, we always got reservations and always got the best tables and the best food. We never had to go through security lines at airports—the airline provides greeters who meet you at the curb and take you directly to security. As an aside, just because you went to the front of the line didn’t mean the TSA gave you special treatment. With all the jewelry my mother wore and all the shit she had crammed in her carry-on (see the chapter “Fly Me to the Moan”), by the time she took everything off and put it in individual plastic bins, I guarantee at least 30 percent of the people behind her had missed their flights.

  My mother couldn’t stand celebrities who complained about the “burden” of fame. She’d say, “I hate the whiners who complain, ‘I can’t go anywhere in public. I have no privacy, people don’t leave me alone, blah blah blah.’ ” Her answer to this was always the same: “If you need some privacy, stay inside the twenty-million-dolla
r gated mansion that fame has afforded you. Or go work in a morgue. No one will bother you. So, shut up!”

  I’ll never forget one night when my godfather, the actor Roddy McDowall, was at my parents’ house for dinner. He was telling us a story about a conversation he had just had with Frank Sinatra. Frank was complaining that he couldn’t go anywhere in public without being recognized and hounded. I guess my Uncle Roddy had had enough of Frank’s “whining” and he turned and said to him, “There’s a very simple solution. Take off your toupee, put on a pair of glasses, and ditch the bodyguard. You’ll look just like any other older Italian man walking down the street.”

  My mother believed that if you were a star, once you got out in public, you were public property. This didn’t mean she thought it was okay for paparazzi to harass stars’ children on their way to school, or have helicopters fly over someone’s house to get a picture. In fact, the only time she refused photos was for the first month after my dad died. I was a teenager, and she wanted to protect me as best she could. She would shake hands, but no pictures. She felt children were off-limits (unless they were in the biz as well). As she got older she became as protective of Cooper as she was of me when I was a child. “Melissa, I signed up to be famous. Cooper didn’t. When he’s an adult, if he wants to be famous—and I don’t know why he wouldn’t—then the paparazzi can take pictures of him when he’s coming out of airports or restaurants or rehab. But not until then!”

  1 For those of you too young to remember the movie or television show Fame, I’m going to make it easy for you: it’s Glee with a less attractive student body.

  * * *

  “Realize how lucky you are. Fame is not a burden.”

  Just Say “Yes”

  Melissa, when it comes to work, pretend you’re a hooker during Fleet Week: Say “Yes” to Everything.

  —JOAN RIVERS

  My mother once told me, “No one ever died from working too hard.” I told her, “I beg to differ. The average life span of cavemen was seventeen years. If they had stopped hauling rocks and felling dinosaurs for a couple of minutes and taken a little R&R, or maybe a couple of random “me weekends,” who knows, maybe they would have lived to be twenty.” She thought about it and said, “Point taken, but maybe all they needed was some good live-in help.”

  When I was growing up I always had to have a job. My parents worked, my grandparents worked, I worked. I think we must have been the long-lost Jewish relatives of René Descartes, because our family motto was “We work, therefore we are.” It didn’t matter whether we had money. I was taught responsibility at an early age. If I concentrate really hard, I can go all the way back to being an infant in a crib and seeing my mother leaning over me and saying, “Burp and diaper yourself, Melissa. No one likes lazy.” From the time I could carry a dish without breaking it, it was my job to clear the table, even though we had professional help—and clear it properly, the way the staff in a five-star restaurant would, not the way Mrs. Ginsberg next door did: throwing Melmac plates in a bus tray and leaving them in the sink until morning. Clearing a table properly meant that after the main course, all the bread-and-butter plates and salt and pepper shakers came off the table immediately, assuming you were eating in the American style—that is, salad first. (If you’re going Continental—which I’m sure many of you do—then it’s a different set of rules altogether, but rest assured, I knew those, too.)

  I had to do the standard chores most kids had to do: I had to make my bed, help with laundry, walk the dog, etc., although my mother’s approach to get me to perform these tasks was unique. The day before my tenth birthday party, due to either excitement or sloth, I left my room a disaster. Even though my parents had asked me for days to clean it up, it was a total mess. My mother opened the door and stood there, silently, with a look of disgust on her face. She didn’t yell at me or punish me or pull a Joan Crawford and make me scrub the floor with a toothbrush. She just stood there, for what seemed like forever, and then very quietly said, “Do you know who leaves their clothes on the floor? The homeless, that’s who. If you’d like to live in a refrigerator box around the corner, let me know; I can arrange it. You know whom I’m friends with? You’ve heard of Sears and Roebuck? Roebuck.”

  I always had summer jobs. One summer I worked on the beach crew of the Sand and Sea Club in Santa Monica, setting up chairs and umbrellas. There was no tipping allowed, but the old ladies would sneak us quarters. What they thought a quarter would buy, God only knows (it was 1989, not 1889), but by the end of the summer, I’d saved enough money to buy my own refrigerator box. Heh! That’ll show her.

  Another summer, I worked at a retail store, Camp Beverly Hills, working on the floor as a “sales assistant,” which meant doing whatever task, no matter how menial, I was asked to do. The takeaway from that job, other than the minimum-wage paycheck and the realization that I might not be a “people person,” was that I finally understood my mother’s horror at the sight of my room on the day before my tenth birthday. Customers are pigs. To this day, I cannot leave a messy fitting room when I’m shopping, due to my “summer in retail.”

  When I was a teenager and competing in equestrian events, if I wanted to ride, I had to help out working in the barn—cleaning tack, washing horses, and rolling bandages. Other than walking behind the horses with a shovel and a bucket, I did everything, and I did it happily. Happily because, if I grumbled or had a sour look on my face, my mother would’ve made sure I was walking behind the horses with a shovel and a bucket. All the other riders, my peer group, just came and went, but I had to clean before I was allowed to join them. A small portion would be taken off my parents’ bill every month in exchange for my services. My parents were trying to teach me about responsibility and the value of work. In spite of my grumbling teenage resistance to their plan, in hindsight, I see that they were right. If you really want something, you’d better be prepared to work hard for it, and the work ethic that they taught me has served me well my entire life. Of course, I didn’t appreciate that until I was forty-one. I don’t think twenty years is too long to hold on to resentment, do you?

  Speedy Gonzalez

  One of the most basic rules of successful parenting is that when dealing with children, both parents have to be on the same page. One of the most basic rules of teenagedom is to divide and conquer. As I’ve mentioned before, my parents felt I was a study in recessive genetics. However, the one place I clearly did not fall into the recessive department was in my ability to assess a situation in order to achieve my desired goal. I normally had a high batting average when it came to this kind of manipulation, but the following incident is an example of a full swing and miss. It was such a swing and miss that you’d have thought I played for the Mets.

  When I was sixteen I got a speeding ticket while driving. (Shocker! A teenager speeding! How unusual!) Mind you, I wasn’t doing a hundred miles per hour in a school zone, or whizzing through a hospital parking lot knocking patients out of wheelchairs, or crashing through a farmers’ market, flattening vegetarians who were shopping for fresh, crisp lettuce. I was on my way home from school and was simply testing the cornering ability of my car.

  Since I was already in trouble with my mother for something or other—this was the normal state of affairs during my teenage years; I spent more time in trouble with her than not, and had actually found a certain comfort zone in the relentless groundings, icy stares, and stony silences—I immediately went to my father and told him I’d gotten the ticket. I knew that my father, having a bit of a lead foot himself, would be significantly more understanding than Driving Miss Crazy. I begged him not to tell my mother—and I mean begged, like a hostage on Criminal Minds fighting to be unchained from the radiator in the basement before the maniac sets off the bomb’s timer. Being in trouble with the police and the DMV was one thing, but having my name on my mother’s shit list—not in pencil, in ink—was a whole ’nother kind of trouble.

  My father, the dear, sweet, easily-manipulated-b
y-his-daughter’s-tears man that he was, swore he wouldn’t say anything and promised he would go to juvenile traffic court with me. And most important, he would never tell my mother. All was good in Melissaland.

  But the day before my scheduled court appearance, my father found out that he couldn’t go with me at the scheduled time, as he had a pressing business matter to attend to. So he wrote a letter to the court stipulating that his assistant, Dorothy, was his legal proxy and that she had the authority to appear with me in court on his behalf. Sounds good, right?

  Wrong.

  The next morning, during my mother’s normal daily snooping sweep of the house, she found the note on my father’s desk. She was apoplectic. Not only was she furious at me for getting the speeding ticket, but she was livid with my father for not only not telling her about it, but also knowingly and willingly engaging in a cover-up. For a man whose reading habits rarely strayed from history, she was shocked that my father had learned nothing from Watergate. She tore the note up and announced that she would be going to court with me.

  Great.

  Can I just say that the drive from our house to the courthouse was more awkward and uncomfortable than a homophobic congressman trying to explain to his wife why he was caught loitering in a men’s room?

  When we walked into court, all the other scofflaws and their families obviously recognized my mother, but she had a look on her face like Mel Gibson looking at his family tree and realizing that one of his relatives was Jewish. Not only did no one approach her for an autograph or photo, but they gave us a Queen Mary–size berth.