She attributed Rivers’s eventual success to her innate ambition, as well as to the ability to strategize that she honed over a lifetime of challenges. “To be as accomplished as she was, you have to be competitive,” Ivanka Trump said. “You have to have perseverance, endurance, and incredible natural drive to succeed. You also have to be highly original and view the world through a different lens. I think you have to have an incredible work ethic. It’s grueling: many weeks of long days, often fifteen to seventeen hours, very long days that can go till one in the morning. You have to be incredibly versatile in your skill set. You look at who’s won that show, and they are people who can take what they learned in life and business and adapt it to unusual situations. There’s no career that prepares you for the diversity of tasks on this show, so you have to be incredibly creative. You don’t always make friends, but you also have to be charming. She won people over.”
Ivanka Trump is also effusive in her praise of Rivers’s personal relationships. “She was very friendly with my aunt, Blaine Trump, and she was really central casting of the friend you want to have: wickedly funny, fiercely loyal, incredibly warm—an amazing friend,” Ivanka Trump said. “Joan cared deeply about other people, and she was very protective of the people she let into her life. She was a very sincere, honest person.”
In describing Joan’s experience on The Celebrity Apprentice, there are virtually no points of overlap between Billy Sammeth’s account and that of Ivanka Trump—except for one. Both acknowledged that Melissa was Joan’s major concern from the outset.
“She’s an amazing mother,” Ivanka Trump said. “Clearly her family was her most important priority, and her daughter came first. She made that clear to everyone.”
Long before The Celebrity Apprentice, Rivers had become as ferocious in pursuing opportunities for her daughter as she was for herself. But when an unlikely TV gig for E! Entertainment Television came along, neither of them ever dreamed that it would revitalize both of their careers—and transform an entire industry.
Chapter Nineteen
Fashion Forward:
Triumph of the Mean Girls
When Rivers first started doing red-carpet commentary for televised awards shows, she didn’t have any grand ambitions. “I just needed a job,” she said.
She began the assignment alone, and then Melissa joined her in interviewing celebrities as they walked into gala events. The gig initially seemed like just another paycheck—and not a particularly promising one. “Joan Rivers started the whole red-carpet thing, but it was desperation that she managed to do this—and to bring along her daughter, which was not easy lifting,” said the composer William Finn.
As a duo, Joan and Melissa first hosted the E! Entertainment Television pre-awards show for the Golden Globe Awards in 1994, and they started doing E!’s annual Academy Awards preshow the following year. When Joan began to use Melissa as her straight man, tag-teaming the red-carpet commentary became unexpectedly fun. “We had a great time together,” Joan said. “We were the only ones that did it in the beginning, and we came up with the phrase ‘Who are you wearing?’ and all that stuff.”
They also came up with an attitude that was more snarky than respectful, as a headline on a Bustle.com essay by Erin Mayer put it: “What Joan Rivers Meant to the Red Carpet—She Was the First Person to Not Kiss Celebrity Ass.”
In truth, their approach was not unprecedented, as Jason Sheeler wrote in an Entertainment Weekly piece about Mr. Blackwell, “the original red-carpet bitch.” A fashion critic and television and radio personality, Mr. Blackwell created an annual awards presentation called the “Ten Worst-Dressed Women” list, published the “Fabulous Fashion Independents” list, and wrote an annual Academy Awards fashion review.
“Mr. Blackwell felt Joan and Melissa had stolen his act, because they were able to push it that much further,” said Sheeler, now the fashion news director at Departures magazine.
In doing so, Joan and Melissa never imagined they were developing a magic new formula for televised fashion coverage. “Melissa told me, ‘We were just doing what we were doing at home, talking shit about celebrities,’” Sheeler recalled. “Melissa said, ‘It’s all about the viewer. We’re there to say what the viewer was thinking.’”
Back in the mid-1990s, no one foresaw that their on-air jokes about celebrities’ dresses would inspire a television franchise—let alone that it would gradually evolve into a major new entertainment genre, spawning an explosive growth in the corollary industries that service it.
“Up until that point, it was just Mr. Blackwell reviewing red-carpet fashion, but in the late 1990s, the convergence of satellite trucks and the twenty-four-hour news cycle happened, and people needed more content,” said Sheeler. “People started looking, and people started caring. Joan ripped off Mr. Blackwell’s shtick, but she was the big game changer. It was Joan Rivers that kicked models off the covers of magazines in favor of actresses. Before then, actresses were not thinking, ‘I have to get dressed up to go out for groceries.’ Today it’s all about head to toe looks, but back then it was not in their job requirement to be fashionable, and a lot of actresses were aggressively unfashionable. To care too much about clothing would have made you silly. But Joan started asking ‘Who are you wearing?,’ and the actresses knew there were going to be live news cameras, and the cameras started panning down, and it was head to toe. The fashion companies began to see the availability of revenues, and stylists were dispatched to dress the celebrities, and slowly the supermodel died—and it can all be traced back to the ‘Who are you wearing?’ moment. Up until that point, nobody gave a fuck.”
But when red-carpet commentary evolved into a major attraction, Joan and Melissa created a new E! television show, Fashion Police, which became a weekly program in September of 2010. It began as a half hour show in which Rivers and several panelists discussed the dos and don’ts of celebrity fashion, and it expanded to one hour in March of 2012.
Rivers had initially disdained the idea of hosting a series whose sole purpose was to dish about dresses. In a 2010 interview with NPR’s Fresh Air, she said, “I didn’t want to do Fashion Police because I thought, ‘This is stupid, this is beneath me, who wants to talk about fashion?’”
When she did, the early reactions were often snidely dismissive. “It may come as a surprise today, but ‘Who are you wearing?’ was once a controversial line,” Erin Mayer wrote. “Many believed that people didn’t care about the fashion aspect of the red carpet and shrugged off Melissa and Joan’s reporting technique, dismissing the famous phrase as shallow and trite. In an interview with Chicago Sun-Times, Joan Rivers said, ‘When I first said it, The New York Times wrote that “this is improper grammar.” They also snipped that not only was my English wrong, but that nobody was interested in what people wore on the red carpets at award shows. I thought, “The New York Times is wrong!” And I was right.’”
Although Joan cared about wearing stylish clothes, she was never known as a fashion insider with any particular breadth of knowledge—but that didn’t stop her from claiming the territory. “Joan made a phony career for herself as a fashion expert, and because she would say and do almost anything, she made a big success out of it,” Liz Smith observed. “The wonderful thing about Hollywood is that no one is sincere. Joan brought the whole concept of down and dirty to the red carpet, where the interviews are so idiotic. ‘Oh, darling, you look so fabulous!’ (‘God, did she look horrible!’) It’s the same thing that goes on in the fashion world.”
Rivers’s enthusiasm grew as she realized such a show would give her a new freedom to say whatever she thought, no matter how spiteful. “I love [Fashion Police] because I don’t have to stand on the red carpet and pretend I like something—it goes against everything I believe in—and smile and say, ‘Don’t you look nice?,’ and the next day say, ‘She looked terrible.’ So I’d rather not have to do the first part,’” Rivers said in a 2010 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “It’s so great. The n
ext day you can really say, ‘The dress is so low-cut, she could’ve sold advertising on her cleavage.’ But if you say that to someone on the red carpet, that’s it. You don’t get them back, and you don’t get any other clients of the PR person back.”
At the outset, Rivers’s approach to the show was startlingly unpredictable. “The very first year, it was so unscripted it really was like somebody’s aunt winging it,” said Charles Busch. “Joan was getting everybody’s names mixed up. But eventually things became more scripted.”
Rivers’s spontaneity was particularly refreshing as stylists became de rigueur and celebrities grew less likely to make heinous sartorial choices. “When Melissa and I started, nobody else was doing this and nobody had stylists,” Joan told Entertainment Weekly. “They all picked their own dresses. It was wonderful because you got to see the good, you got to see the bad. You got to see what a real person thought they look good in. These days they have a stylist and they have a PR person walking with them. God forbid you say something bad about it, they’ll never let you talk to them again…If you had to tell everybody, ‘Don’t you look great!,’ then we’re not telling anybody anything.”
Ever the entertainers, Melissa and Joan managed to compensate for the safe, boring choices of celebrities with their own bitchy commentary. “Some of the one-liners she wrote were so outrageous,” said one Hollywood movie director. “There was a picture of a model in some designer dress that was pale gray and pink crepe, and it trailed down with a lot of fabric. Joan said, ‘It looks like Clint Eastwood’s balls—it’s gray and pink and it drags on the floor.’ Only Joan Rivers could say that and get away with it.”
Alternately ingratiating and insulting, Joan and Melissa terrorized female celebrities with such features as “Starlet or Streetwalker.” The attitudinal shift they brought to the red carpet generated so much audience appeal that Fashion Police’s popularity proved to have enormous commercial implications, generating money-making opportunities far beyond the show itself. “The comedienne transformed the red carpet into the highly lucrative circus we know today,” the Daily Mail said when Joan died.
Calling her “a pioneer when it came to the way we report on how celebrities dress,” the Daily Mail explained that Rivers had “invented a place for the celebrity stylist, paving the way for the likes of Rachel Zoe to guide famous faces in dressing better to avoid her acerbic commentary…This, in turn, sparked the development of a sartorial merry-go-round that is today of huge financial value to fashion brands and the celebrities who wear their designs. Before Rivers started critiquing the red carpet in the midnineties, little attention was given to what celebrities wore to awards ceremonies. But when the already successful comedienne and daughter Melissa were invited to cohost the E! Entertainment Television pre-awards coverage for the Golden Globes in 1994, everything changed…The resulting show was such a success that the pair continued to host the show annually as Live from the Red Carpet until 2003, cementing Rivers’s position as a red-carpet critic to both love and fear. While her success inspired a whole coterie of TV fashion critics, Rivers always remained the grande dame—largely thanks to the fact that she was never afraid of what the A-list might think if she were to cast a negative opinion. And those opinions were so popular with viewers, they sparked the genesis of the red carpet as a TV event. Indeed, E!’s hugely popular Fashion Police, which launched in 2010 and was fronted by Rivers herself, is a direct result of that effect. Now, the right dress can make or break a star’s career, and in turn, if a small label is lucky enough to dress a major celebrity for a high-profile occasion, their business can skyrocket. As a result, celebrities can be paid six-figure sums to wear a custom-made gown to the Oscars, and there is an entire industry built around making such partnerships happen.”
In her 2010 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Rivers said, “I think what’s happened in general is [the celebrities have] all got stylists.”
But no matter how much professional advice an actress buys to help her create a flawless look, no one can count on being insulated from savage reviews, of her body if not her outfit—and some have spoken out to criticize what such attacks represent.
“There are shows like the Fashion Police that are just showing these generations of young people to judge people based on all the wrong values and that it’s okay to point at people and call them ugly or fat,” Jennifer Lawrence told Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer while promoting The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. “We have to stop treating each other like that and stop calling each other fat.”
Rivers struck back on Twitter. “WAIT! It just dawned on me why Jennifer Lawrence fell on her way up to the stage to get her Oscar,” Rivers said, referring to Lawrence’s stumble after being named best actress for Silver Linings Playbook. “She tripped over her own arrogance.”
She didn’t leave it at that. In what might be pop culture’s most striking case of the pot calling the kettle black, the eighty-year-old Rivers picked an astoundingly ironic issue as another weapon to attack Hollywood’s hottest young actress, who was twenty-three at the time. “She has been touched up more than a choirboy at the Vatican,” Rivers told the New York Post.
Even when they’re not being criticized, some actresses are fed up with the hysterical scrutiny, which often crosses the line into farce. Jennifer Aniston and Julianne Moore refused to put their hands in the E! network’s mani cam, which was designed to allow carefully manicured celebrities to “walk” their hands down a miniature red carpet. Elisabeth Moss pretended to flip the bird toward the cameras at an E! broadcast, and Cate Blanchett demanded “Do you do that to the guys?” when a cameraman panned up and down her dress.
“Since I’ve been strutting the red carpet, things have changed a lot,” Blanchett said. “The way women are asked about these red-carpet moments—oh my God, it’s just a dress! [People] forget the fact that women are up there because they’ve given extraordinary performances…Let’s not forget the work.”
Knowledgeable observers see the significance of larger trends embedded in such spats. “A lot of these actresses don’t understand the history of it,” said Jason Sheeler. “Joan was tacky, and there was a lot of disrespect among actresses. But some actresses who used to bad-mouth Joan Rivers got cosmetic contracts because of Joan Rivers. So now we’re in a world where the stars are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to wear a necklace for an hour at the Oscars—and that’s the legacy of Joan Rivers. Jennifer Lawrence has a multimillion-dollar contract with Dior for red-carpet fashion, and she only has that today because of Joan Rivers, because nobody cared about actresses in gowns before Joan Rivers. From that moment on, everyone’s game was upped, and actresses started being on the covers of magazines.”
As Rivers let fly with whatever outrageous remarks popped into her head, her attacks helped to create a skyrocketing demand for the entertainment value of such content, and the show began to build a whole new audience that spanned several generations, drawing in hordes of unlikely new fans.
Chip Duckett, who produced Rivers’s live New York shows for many years, compared the television show to the rapid-fire insults of her stand-up comedy act. “Fashion Police felt like the first time she was allowed to be that similar to what she did live, and that sort of take-no-prisoners humor on E! brought her a huge audience all over the world,” he said.
“Everyone watched Fashion Police—all these people you didn’t think knew what E! Entertainment was,” said Robert Higdon. “I was amazed. The spring of the year before Joan died, we had lunch at Michael’s with Deborah Norville and her husband. Joan and I walked back, and all these young kids were running up to her, wanting to pose with her and take selfies. She didn’t turn one of them away. What would have taken us twenty minutes took us an hour and a half. At her age, sixteen-year-old girls loved her.”
It would be impossible to quantify the cumulative impact of Rivers’s nasty commentary, but the trends it encouraged undoubtedly helped to normalize the sexist cruelty that has become standard f
are throughout popular culture. In cyberspace as elsewhere, women—both public figures and private citizens, no matter what their age or background—are routinely subjected to vicious criticism of every aspect of their appearance. For female public figures of any kind, venturing an opinion can instantly elicit horrifyingly misogynist threats of rape, dismemberment, and other harrowing forms of death from an army of trolls.
But for Rivers, her unexpected incarnation as America’s oldest mean girl paid off in revenue as well as in new fans, boosting everything from her stand-up bookings to her QVC income. “Fashion Police was a gold mine for her, because it cemented her authority—she was ‘the fashion police,’ the lady who said people looked good or bad—and it grew the business,” said David Dangle. “It was a great power base, it kept her relevant, and it gave her a younger viewer. When Kendall Jenner is worried about what Joan Rivers is going to say, that’s amazing.”
Rivers found her latter-day success so exhilarating that scaling back her schedule seemed out of the question. “I would say to her various managers, ‘What happens when Joan wants to retire?’ And they would say, ‘You’re joking,’” Dangle recalled.
If Rivers resisted the idea of handing over any torches, she grew increasingly paranoid about the lengthening parade of potential rivals coming up behind her, and she hated it when people asked about the younger women dogging her trail. No matter what her age, she wasn’t ready to cede the spotlight.
Some would-be successors found her welcoming. “She could afford to be generous to me, because I wasn’t in her league,” said Margaret Cho. “I was never a threat to her, because I’m not white and I’m not fancy, so I guess she didn’t feel she had to worry, and she was always loving and kind. But she was very jealous of Kathy and very threatened by Kathy, even though there was no reason to be.”
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