Last Girl Before Freeway

by Leslie Bennetts

  While she was growing up, Melissa experimented with various passions that might have provided an alternative to her mother’s world. As a child, she was a dancer and an equestrienne who competed on the show circuits. As a student, she was an intelligent Ivy Leaguer who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in European history.

  But when her father committed suicide, that trauma shaped her life forever. “I have massive abandonment issues,” Melissa said in a 2005 interview with her mother on CNN’s Larry King Live. “I suppose they’re getting better, because I can now talk about the fact that my big fear is, everybody leaves. Nobody’s word is good. The last thing my father said to me was, ‘I will see you tomorrow.’ You know, that’s the great lie of my life—the great lie told to me by the most important man in my life. ‘I will see you tomorrow’ was the last phone call we had. Obviously, you know, I didn’t, so I have a lot of abandonment issues. There was a lot of anger. What’s so alarming for me about suicide is, I really feel that the victims are the ones that are left behind, because it destroys your relationships, or can destroy, if you allow them to, with the living, with the survivors. Our relationship was almost destroyed because of Daddy’s suicide. And that’s something I think people don’t talk about enough. The first thing you want to do…is point fingers and say, ‘What if? If only. If you had done this, if I had done that.’ And I think you get a bad case of what I now call ‘the what-ifs,’ or ‘the if-onlys.’”

  During the estrangement from her mother, “something terrible and traumatic happened to me,” Melissa told People magazine in 1993. According to the magazine, “At a particularly vulnerable point—three months after her father’s suicide—she began to date a fellow student at Penn and suddenly found herself ‘in an abusive relationship.’ At the time, she says, ‘I was so far gone [emotionally] that I don’t know if I was allowing myself to physically feel the pain.’ She stayed with him through two ugly incidents—Melissa refuses to discuss the specifics—but the third time, she says, was the last straw. ‘I realized that I had a lot more to offer than to have someone hit me,’ she explains, ‘and I just said, “This is it.” It made me realize what I had—and the thing I had and will always have is my mother. She was right there for me.’”

  The story went on, “Joan remembers Melissa’s phone call well. ‘She called me and said, “Mother, don’t worry, he pushed my face into glass, but I didn’t cut my eye.” I wanted to take that son of a bitch and kill him, but I couldn’t say that to her.’ Nor could she tell Melissa not to go back to him. ‘But I asked her to remember that if she did, she was opening a door to that kind of abuse for the rest of her life. This was her battle. I allowed her to make the choice.’…And Melissa was grateful. ‘She didn’t condemn me. She never asked me, “How could you have gone back to him?”’ she says. ‘She just said, “Okay, this is the situation. Let’s deal with it.”’”

  When Melissa graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, Joan gave one of the commencement addresses. “In the middle of the speech, Joan broke into tears as she told the crowd, ‘I’m so proud of my daughter,’” People reported.

  The year after graduation, Melissa abandoned the tainted name of Rosenberg, adopted her mother’s stage name, and embarked on her perpetually fraught journey as Joan’s Mini-Me, the identity that evolved into her real career. Melissa Rosenberg was the tortured child of a man who killed himself in a hotel room a few blocks from his daughter’s college residence in Philadelphia. Melissa Rivers became the hardworking, hard-boiled successor to as much of her mother’s formidable legacy as she was able to pass on—which turned out to be a great deal.

  “Melissa wanted to be her own person, but Joan wanted her daughter to be with her, and once Melissa made the decision to go into show business, Joan was going to do everything she could to help her,” said Dorothy Melvin. “Melissa is a sharp girl, and she’s had a great education, but I think Joan pushed her more than Melissa might have wanted to be pushed. When it comes to family, Joan was very controlling.”

  In the years since then, Melissa has worked as an actress, a producer, and a television host who succeeded her mother as the anchor of Fashion Police in addition to serving as the show’s executive producer. David Dangle now runs Joan’s clothing and jewelry company and sells its products on QVC, but Melissa is co-CEO of the family business. Eight months after her mother’s death, she also became an author when The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation was published—just in time for a Mother’s Day sales blitz.

  Melissa’s résumé includes appearances on such television shows as Beverly Hills, 90210 and her costarring role in the infamous docudrama Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story. Melissa also costarred as her mother’s straight man in the on-air red-carpet commentary they pioneered in the early 1990s. Other credits include hosting the E! network television specials Oh Baby! Melissa’s Guide to Pregnancy and Oh Toddler! Surviving the Early Years.

  More recently, Melissa was a cocreator and coproducer of In Bed with Joan, which featured her mother interviewing another celebrity—Kathy Griffin, Kelly Osbourne, Margaret Cho, and RuPaul were among the participants—in Joan’s bed for a YouTube Web series that uploaded a new video weekly.

  But no matter what she did, Melissa was always dogged by the rude question of whether she was even suited to such a career. “She doesn’t have the talent,” said a friend of her mother’s—one among many who expressed that view in virtually the same words.

  Not wanting to be cruel, most won’t say such things for attribution. An exception is Billy Sammeth, Joan’s former manager, who is overtly derisive about Melissa. “Well, she’s not my favorite girl for a lot of reasons. Mainly because I respect people with talent,” he told the Daily Beast in 2012. “I’m not so sure, if you’re talented yourself, you take on your mother’s stage name. It’s not Liza Garland, for God’s sake. But Joan has gotten away during this phase of her career with bringing Melissa along with her. ‘It’s you and me, kid,’ she seems to be saying.”

  Some friends wish Melissa had felt free to find her own path in life. “If I could go back and help Melissa make decisions, I would have told her, ‘I don’t know why you’re trying to follow in your mother’s footsteps—your mother is a complete original, and there’s no way for you to hold a candle to her, so why are you even going in that direction?’” said Andrew Krasny, Joan’s former assistant and a friend of Melissa’s in their youth. “She should have been a lawyer or a doctor, but Joan wanted her nearby, and she wanted to be close to her mother, and this was a way she could. I’m sure Melissa wanted to prove to her mother that she was talented. Joan was very aware of the vicious side of the business, and she knew that the one person who would never screw her was Melissa, so why wouldn’t she want her on board?”

  Other observers believe Melissa doesn’t get enough credit for her contributions, particularly on the red carpet and Fashion Police. “Joan was the comic, but Melissa was the brains behind everything, handling the business,” said Jason Sheeler, the fashion news director at Departures.

  Joan was always furious when anyone questioned Melissa’s qualifications. “She really and truly loved her daughter,” said the television and radio host Joe Franklin. “Somebody would say something stupid, talking about nepotism and how her daughter wouldn’t be working if she wasn’t Joan Rivers’s daughter. You couldn’t deny that, but she defended it. I actually saw her yell at such a person. She laced into that lady: ‘How dare you!’ She was a scrapper, and people feared her. They thought she was like a tiger who would bite them. They were afraid of crossing her.”

  That embattled stance characterized Joan’s maternal approach from the outset. Melissa grew up in a household where the family ethos was: Fuck them before they fuck you.

  Melissa tried valiantly to live up to her mother’s expectations, but she often seemed as miserable as if she were trying to fit into the wrong-size shoes. “Melissa used to look so uncomfortabl
e on Fashion Police,” said the composer William Finn. “That was the only time I was annoyed with Joan. I felt that Joan was pushing her daughter to do something she wasn’t equipped to do.”

  And Joan pushed with a ferocity that sometimes seemed deranged. “On Celebrity Apprentice, she was a mother bear protecting her cub,” said Finn. “When someone did something mean to Melissa, Joan became unbelievably vitriolic.”

  But even when they disapproved, many observers also felt compassion, both for the ferocious mama bear and for the long-suffering daughter. “Joan was very appreciative of whatever I did to help Melissa,” said Liz Smith. “Melissa was a nice, sweet girl, and I just wanted to be nice to her. I feel sorry for those kids; if the parents are stars, they can never come up to the parental stardom. I didn’t know whether Melissa had any talent or not and didn’t care, but I felt that Joan was always forcing her to have a career, whatever it was.”

  Unfortunately, Joan’s efforts created the widespread impression that Melissa lacked the ability to succeed on her own—a judgment that elicited snarky comments from friends and foes alike.

  Some of the mother-daughter collaborations were universally considered to be cringeworthy. When Joan created Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story, friends and colleagues recognized that the movie would reflect badly on both of them, and its timing was also harmful for the Broadway run of Sally Marr. But Joan was desperate to help Melissa, and nothing else mattered. “Joan said, ‘Missy needs the tape!’” Lonny Price reported.

  At the time, Joan had another powerful motive for wanting to work with her daughter: they were estranged, and Joan wanted desperately to repair the rupture. “Melissa blamed Joan for Edgar’s death, and Joan didn’t know how to undo the anger,” said Rivers’s WOR colleague David Bernstein.

  But she cared more about healing that breach than anything else. “Her biggest concern was reestablishing the relationship with Melissa,” said Larry Ferber. “It was the only thing in Joan’s life that was more important than her career.”

  Melissa was always the core of Joan’s emotional life, and that never changed. “Melissa was her world, and she was a very nurturing mother,” said Martyn Fletcher, who spent many holidays with them. “She would phone her all the time, and she would always try to include her in everything.”

  Joan made jokes about the frequency of her phone calls, which seemed excessive by the standards of most adult offspring: “My daughter and I are very close. We speak every single day and I call her every day and I say the same thing: ‘Pick up, I know you’re there.’ And she says the same thing back: ‘How’d you get this new number?’”

  But Joan didn’t think it was funny when other people joked about her attempts to shoehorn Melissa into every gig. Throughout the entertainment industry, people who wanted to work with Joan learned that she would pull every possible string to make Melissa part of the package—just as she had in refusing to go on The Celebrity Apprentice until the show agreed to take Melissa as well.

  Mark Simone had similar experiences when booking Rivers for his radio show. “She would say, ‘I’ve got to have Melissa on with me,’ which nobody really wanted,” Simone reported. “Melissa couldn’t give you funny one-liners.”

  Some friends nonetheless believe that Melissa has paid her dues and earned those opportunities. “At risk of her own career, Joan added Melissa to everything she did, in order to give her game,” said Sue Cameron. “It was very hard for Melissa. She knew very well that Joan was forcing her on people. But along the way, Melissa developed. She became very skilled. She’s a very good producer, and she’s come into her own with the acerbic wit, and she’s really good. She now legitimately deserves to be on Fashion Police.”

  Other friends emphasize the benefits of having a parent who cared so much. “Joan was an amazing mother,” said Blaine Trump. “Not only did she help with Melissa’s career, but she gave Melissa a tremendous sense of self-confidence. Her mother did the opposite with Joan. I think she really wanted Melissa to understand that she could do anything. She worried about Melissa, and she always tried to give her guidance. I think Joan really felt her wisdom was something Melissa could benefit from, and she felt Melissa didn’t get it. I think it started with the estrangement. The wounds heal, but there are scars.”

  But the downside of such helicopter parenting was that Melissa never really grew up in her mother’s eyes. Joan always wanted to control what her daughter did, and that led to conflict. “There was a lot of disharmony, in terms of the choices Melissa made,” said Andrew Krasny. “But she was able to be the best mother she could be, and to genuinely care about her daughter, who is entitled and rebellious and not as talented as her mother. I think Melissa did the best she could do.”

  Some observers think Melissa actually feels superior to her mother. “Joan has made her what she is, whatever that is. Joan Rivers’s daughter, I guess is all, finally,” said Billy Sammeth. “And Melissa is almost angry that she is Joan Rivers’s daughter. Her attitude is, Joan is the embarrassment—she is the talent.”

  In “TV’s Queen Bitch,” a 2003 essay for Salon that described Joan as “unbelievably vile and crude,” Carina Chocano noted the “seething familial resentment” that characterized many of Melissa’s interactions with her mother on Fashion Police. Chocano suggested they launch a new reality show so “you’d get the unadulterated pleasure of watching Melissa gamely try to keep things clean, vapid, and obsequious as her mother lets fly increasingly revolting and mortifying remarks just so she can watch her daughter’s face twist into a mask of pure hatred.”

  If Melissa was embarrassed by her mother, she never rejected her perennial roles as sidekick and dependent. Joan continued to feel responsible for supporting her daughter, even in middle age. “For many years, Joan’s obsession was, ‘I’ve got to keep working—I’ve got to make sure Melissa is taken care of,’” Trump said. “She said, ‘Melissa doesn’t have a husband—who’s going to take care of her?’ She never wanted Melissa to be worried about money—and with Joan, the sky’s the limit.”

  As the family breadwinner, Joan didn’t seem to realize that Melissa might be able to support herself—if not at the level to which she was accustomed. “She just wanted Melissa to be self-sufficient and not to have to depend on anyone,” said Sabrina Lott Miller, who still works for the family.

  But Melissa grew up with private schools and designer clothes, mansions and yacht trips—not to mention innumerable opportunities she enjoyed because of her mother’s achievements instead of having to earn them on her own. “Melissa’s been extremely well taken care of,” said one friend. “She sort of lives in a fool’s paradise.”

  Such privilege reached its apotheosis in Melissa’s wedding—an extraordinary event even by the standards of the Gilded Age proclivities of the one percent. Over the course of a lifetime, Joan created a lot of elaborate productions, including her opulent homes and her lavish parties. But nothing ever came close to the wedding she gave her thirty-year-old daughter in 1998.

  For the impatient mother of the bride, it had been a long wait. Melissa, who was working as an on-camera host for E! Entertainment Television, lived in Los Angeles, where “it’s hideous to be single, because all the guys want to be with models and actresses,” she said. “I can’t compete with all those skinny, beautiful, tall people. I once went for two years without a date. I held the record. I was also a full-fledged psycho magnet. If there was a guy who would really be bad for me in a room, you could blindfold me and spin me around, and I would walk straight toward him.”

  A passionate equestrienne who spent her weekends competing as a jumper, Melissa met her future husband, a horse trainer named John Endicott, at a horse show in Palm Springs. She was immediately enthralled. “He was so sweet, so unaffected,” she said. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m an electrician, but really what I want to do is write a screenplay.’ You can’t get away from that in L.A.”

  A few months after they got involved, Endicott moved to Lo
s Angeles and the couple started living together. “It just happened,” Melissa said. “It was the old, ‘You can stay with me until you find your own place.’ It was never found.”

  They got married five years later. When Endicott flew to New York to ask Joan for permission to marry Melissa, Joan said, “What took you so long?”

  Endicott had some appealing attributes. When Lois Smith Brady wrote up the wedding in the Vows column of The New York Times, she described him as looking “like the actor Emilio Estevez, with eyes as blue as little swimming pools.”

  But for Joan, what mattered was that her daughter had someone she could count on. “I wanted so much for Melissa to settle down, to find an anchor,” she told Brady. “Family is everything. Everything. It’s a rough, rough world out there, and you need your own little army.”

  Joan knew what it was like to have such an anchor, and she knew how it felt to lose it. “It was very important for her daughter to have someone to call when she landed in another country, because that’s what Joan wanted for herself,” Cameron explained. “In Joan’s mind, it was for Melissa’s own good.”

  So were Joan’s ideas about how her daughter’s nuptials should look—something she had fantasized about for years. “She will have a dream wedding,” Joan told People magazine in 1993. “It will be very elegant and very formal. Black tie.”

  Melissa had other ideas, according to People: “‘Oh, no,’ counters Melissa. ‘I’d rather run off to Vegas—that chapel near the Riviera Hotel.’ The two laugh. They’ve played this song before. ‘She doesn’t have a choice,’ Joan insists. ‘It’ll be something like the Metropolitan Club. Lester Lanin will play “You’re the Top,” and we’ll two-step around the room.’…Melissa sighs and shrugs. ‘There are some things in life I’m resigned to,’ she says lightly.”