When Melissa finally got married, Joan had her way. “This wedding is going to be romantic,” she said. “I want it to be a fairy tale. No reality. I don’t want one of those modern weddings with a Japanese flower and a candle on each table. This is over the top.”
That didn’t even begin to describe it. Published reports of how much money Rivers spent on the event ranged up to $3 million. “Joan wanted a royal wedding, a royal St. Petersburg wedding—Anastasia getting married,” said Cameron.
In realizing that vision, Joan’s friends suspected that her fantasies had won out over her daughter’s. “Melissa would have been happy just eloping, but I think Joan was caught up in making it a big showbiz thing,” said Dorothy Melvin.
Rivers commissioned the floral designer Preston Bailey to re-create a winter wonderland from Doctor Zhivago with a hundred tall white birch trees and thirty thousand white roses, hydrangeas, and lilies of the valley. The results were awe-inspiring even by the standards of the rich, famous, and jaded.
“The wedding was absolutely un-fucking-believable,” said Pete Hathaway. “We walked in through a moonlit snow-covered birch bower, and it was so staggering I felt as if I should have been onstage at the Metropolitan Opera. Where the snow had drifted into the crotch of a tree, that was done with white roses and white orchids. I had never seen so many flowers in my life. I happened to be walking in at the same time as C. Z. Guest, and she turned to me and said, ‘I have been to a lot of parties with some of the richest people all over the world, and I have never seen anything like this.’”
If anyone needed a reason for such extravagance, Rivers cited her heritage. “She was a Russian descendant,” said Larry Ferber. “It was gorgeous. It was so over the top it was ridiculous.”
“On the stairs leading up to the ballroom, there was a Russian soldier in a black fur hat holding a plate of hors d’oeuvres, mostly caviar,” said Cameron. “Joan hung pictures to make it look like the Hermitage. They were projected all around the ballroom.”
The actual ceremony was presided over by a rabbi, a minister, and a chaplain from the United Nations. The bride wore a Vera Wang gown of ivory duchess satin and velvet, adorned with gold embroidery and Swarovski crystals and accented with a sable muff. The mother of the bride wore a champagne-colored ensemble with sable trim, and she made sure she got her own moment in the spotlight.
“The doors fly open and there’s Joan, dressed to kill, walking in to ‘Big Spender,’” Larry Ferber said.
A flamboyant number sung to a striptease beat by the dance hall “girls” who taunt the paying customers in the Broadway musical Sweet Charity, “Big Spender” was sung at Melissa’s wedding by the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus as Rivers sashayed down the aisle. “Only Joan could have pulled that off,” said the writer Annette Tapert. “It was a star turn.”
After the ceremony, the wedding guests dined on lobster, Angus beef, and a five-tiered Sylvia Weinstock carrot cake in the Plaza Hotel ballroom, attended by footmen in powdered wigs and nineteenth-century French regalia. “Joan brought in china and crystal for five hundred people, because she didn’t like what the Plaza Hotel had,” Dorothy Melvin reported.
“She got nineteen hundred ruby, emerald, and cobalt glasses—very Czarist Russia,” said Pete Hathaway. “Joan was in her element.”
As for her advice on marriage, Rivers shared with The New York Times the wisdom she’d imparted to her daughter: “If it’s a choice between cooking or cleaning or looking good, go get that facial. No man ever made love to a woman because she kept a clean house.”
Despite all the hoopla, few believed the marriage would work. “Every single person at that wedding was thinking, ‘This is never going to last,’” said Pete Hathaway. “The one thing they had in common was horses.”
But Joan had her hopes. “She wanted Melissa to live happily ever after,” said Sabrina Lott Miller. “Because of her upbringing, she wanted that for her daughter. I think she still felt like there was a chance.”
Two years after Melissa got married, she produced the grandson her mother adored, who was named Edgar Cooper Endicott as an homage to the grandfather he never knew. For Melissa, that was a redemptive act: she wanted “to reaffirm my father’s life by naming my son after him,” she said.
Three years after that, Melissa and her husband were divorced, and the family unit became Melissa and Cooper and Joan, who commuted to Los Angeles and lived with her daughter and grandson part-time. Cooper was also recruited as a character in such family productions as the reality show Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?
“Anything with Cooper and Melissa gave Joan a great deal of happiness, but with Cooper especially, she loved teaching him and opening his eyes to the glories of the world,” said Blaine Trump.
Joan made a regular tradition of taking Cooper on trips, and one of their annual destinations was a dude ranch in Wyoming. “She hated the boots, she hated the plaid shirts, she hated the jeans, but she wanted to make sure Cooper had those memories,” Miller recalled.
Although Cooper is growing up in privileged circumstances, his mother absorbed the family ethos of constant striving. The second-generation offspring of America’s rich and famous often fail to emulate their parents’ penchant for industry, but Melissa always earned respect for adopting her mother’s work ethic.
The reviews of her behavior have been somewhat more mixed. “Melissa was not as nice as Joan,” said one television producer who dealt with them both. “She was clearly more self-centered and entitled. Whereas Joan was lovingly abrasive, Melissa was unlovingly hostile. Children of celebrities like that have this barrier around them. When you watch her on Fashion Police, she seems unsettled and angsty, not happy with things.”
Although Melissa did a creditable job of playing her mother in Joy, the 2015 David O. Russell movie about Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano, no one who knew the family saw Melissa as a latter-day incarnation of Joan.
“They were so different they were like chalk and cheese,” said Blaine Trump. “Joan thought of Melissa as a surfer girl; she loved the outdoors. Melissa was always a California girl with no interest in New York. Can you see Joan on a surfboard, swimming?”
After building a happier life for herself in New York, Joan retained sour memories of Los Angeles. “Joan always said about that community, ‘They don’t stab you in the back—they stab you in the chest,’” Trump reported.
Joan had been deeply imprinted with her mother’s aspirations, and when Melissa grew up, Joan was pained by the gap between her daughter’s taste and her own. “I remember going to Joan’s house once for dinner and everything was so incredible, and she said, ‘Who’s going to want my finger bowls after I’m gone? Melissa’s not going to want them. She’s not interested in any of my stuff,’” Trump recalled. “They were very different. Joan always wanted to redecorate Melissa’s house.”
At Melissa’s 5,000-square-foot house in the Pacific Palisades, “it’s a very California lifestyle,” Pete Hathaway said. And Joan’s relentless bullying drove her daughter crazy.
“Joan used to stay at Melissa’s when she was in L.A., three days out of every week,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “They filmed the majority of their WE TV reality show, Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?, there, as well as Joan’s Web series, in which the comedian conducted interviews with celebrities from her bed. Joan complained about Melissa’s house all the time—especially her bedroom, which she once compared to the nicest room at a Holiday Inn. Unlike Joan’s New York City penthouse, an outrageously luxe space fit for Marie Antoinette, Melissa’s home feels more lived-in. It’s more shabby-chic than eighteenth-century France. There’s a lacrosse net for Cooper in the backyard and a collection of snow globes in the kitchen.”
Joan seemed to regard her daughter’s adulthood as an annoying development that demanded unwelcome adjustments from a mother who was not willing to make them. It was one thing to recognize that your daughter had grown up—but quite another to let her lead an autonomous
life.
Negotiating the contested territory between their individual lives—deeply enmeshed despite the three thousand miles that ostensibly separated them—would remain a lifelong project. Even when Melissa was herself a middle-aged parent, Rivers remained a mother who came into her daughter’s home and—without even consulting Melissa, let alone asking permission—rearranged the furniture as she saw fit.
Such antics struck many observers as outrageous. “On Joan Knows Best?, when she lives with Melissa, she redecorates Melissa’s house while she’s gone,” said fashion consultant Jeffrey Mahshie. “How did she not know Melissa is going to be pissed? Nobody really does that. At least Joan had a sense of fun. She saw entertainment value in everything. If it was going to entertain us to set Melissa up on a date, she was going to do it, even if it would irritate Melissa, because Melissa would get over it. Joan wasn’t going to change.”
Her exasperated daughter was eventually forced to accept the same conclusion. After one argument, Melissa accused her mother of not respecting her boundaries. The next day, Rivers announced that she had thought seriously about this. Momentarily excited, Melissa imagined that her mother was finally going to concede Melissa’s right to self-determination.
That was not what her mother had decided, as Melissa explained in her memoir, The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation.
What Joan actually said was, “Melissa, I acknowledge that you have boundaries. I just choose to not respect them.”
Boundaries didn’t survive on camera either. Both mother and daughter seemed endlessly willing to turn private moments into public fodder for one of their reality shows.
“Did you see the episode of Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?…of Joan smoking pot and getting high?” Kevin Sessums said to Billy Sammeth in their Daily Beast interview. “Melissa had to go ‘rescue’ her and drive her home and stop for cheeseburgers because Joan had the munchies so bad.”
Joan’s boundary issues were equally apparent when it came to Melissa’s sex life. “Some parents never talk to their children about sex. My mother never stopped,” Melissa said.
She even tried to turn talk into training. “Joan would call and say, ‘I have to find someone to teach Melissa how to give a blow job. She has to learn how to keep a man,’” Cameron reported.
Rivers was deeply impressed by long-standing rumors that Kris Jenner encouraged—or even masterminded—the sex tape that helped launch Kim Kardashian’s fame and the family’s fortune. “I begged Melissa to do a sex tape,” Joan said. “I said, ‘I’ll even hold the lube.’ Melissa is such a princess. She said, ‘What will the thread count of the sheets be?’”
When Melissa turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars to pose naked for Playboy magazine, Joan was so irate she turned it into a bit. “The nerve of that bitch!” she shrieked. “She’s been divorced for three years and I’m still paying off her wedding. I’m seventy-five fucking years old, standing on a red carpet saying, ‘Who are you wearing?’ Who are you? Five hundred thousand dollars, and she turns it down? Pull down your pants and show them the pussy!”
In private, Joan was doubly resentful that she herself had not been offered such a payday. “Nobody ever asked me to pose for Playboy,” she complained.
Despite such skirmishes, Rivers’s primary goal for Melissa remained the same one her parents had for her: to get her married off. “I think everyone has to have somebody,” Joan said. “It bothers me when she doesn’t.”
Since her mother wasn’t satisfied with most suitors, Melissa offered a typically sardonic response: “She wants me to be with the person she thinks I should be with.”
“Joan was always dying to have Melissa marry a banker, a doctor, a lawyer—someone successful who would bring home the bacon—but that’s not what Melissa has been attracted to,” said Pete Hathaway.
Although Melissa had boyfriends, it was hard for men to compete with her primary relationship. “The fiber of Melissa’s life was always about her mother,” said Blaine Trump.
After Melissa grew up, Joan satisfied some of her maternal drive by channeling it toward other people. “She was like a mother, not just to me but to everybody,” said Mark Simone. “She wanted to talk to everybody and find out about them. Did they have a wife? A husband? Could she fix them up? She was the biggest matchmaker you ever saw. She was always trying to fix me up.”
If Rivers couldn’t resist telling her daughter what to do, she was an equal opportunity bossypants who took the same approach with everyone else too. “When you’d introduce her to anybody, she’d say, ‘The jewelry—good. But what you’re wearing—not right,’” said Mark Simone. “And she was always right.”
It would be difficult for anyone to follow such a larger-than-life mother, and Joan made it clear that her daughter had no hope of competing with her.
“Missy, you don’t have to be perfect,” Joan said on Fashion Police. “You know why? Because I already am.”
Losing such a parent has been an immeasurable blow. “Melissa is still struggling to accept Joan’s death,” the Los Angeles Times reported the following year. “On bad days, she locks herself in her closet and screams and cries.”
Slowly, however, Melissa is trying to find her own way. “My whole life cannot be about my mother’s legacy,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Time of Her Life:
Fame, Friends, and Fun
A dozen years before she died, Rivers went to “a stuffy dinner party” in Connecticut and met the woman she would thereafter refer to as her best friend. Most people don’t make a brand-new BFF when they’re senior citizens, but as Rivers later noted, “Marjorie was the only other person who laughed out loud when someone said Demi Moore was talented.”
“We clicked,” said Margie Stern, who had a long career as the owner of several Manhattan shops called Pizazz before dedicating her retail experience to job training for young people as part of a nonprofit charity. “I never expected to click with someone like Joan Rivers. I’ve been married forever, and I’m not a woman’s woman, in that sense; I don’t have best friends. But she always felt that I got her. We wanted to be sisters, and we called each other Sissy; it was a running gag. Things were riotous and crazy. Every time I saw her, we laughed from the minute she got in the car. That’s what our relationship was: have a good time. Just have fun!”
Their relationship took off the way new friendships between two girls often do in elementary school, with ecstatic mutual appreciation and constant contact. “She couldn’t spell worth a damn, but we pretty much emailed all the time,” said Stern, whose husband, Michael, is a businessman who produced fragrances for Oscar de la Renta.
“I think they appreciated the fact that in their later years, they kind of found kindred spirits,” said Ricki Stern, Margie’s daughter.
Rivers already had friends and relatives who depended on her for professional or financial assistance, but Stern was different. “I don’t have an agenda; I didn’t need anything from her, and I never wanted her to do anything for me,” she said.
Together, they found humor in everything. “One time I had just gotten a mailing about how to know if you have Alzheimer’s, and we were making up a laundry list of things that were so stupid—just dumb things, but we were both so hysterical we couldn’t walk,” Stern said. “I had to sit down on the ground. I was laughing so hard I was going to wet my pants. We just had so much fun.”
Rivers was known for playing practical jokes on her friends, but with Stern she redoubled her efforts. “When we walked down the street, she would approach total strangers and say, ‘Who’s prettier—her or me?’ I never won. They always chose her,” said Stern, who is stunning. “One time she had a gorilla deliver a birthday cake to me that said, ‘Dear Margie, Happy eightieth birthday.’ I was in my early seventies at the time. The gorilla whispered to me, ‘You look pretty good for your age.’”
Stern reciprocated in kind: “On her birthday, I had a cake delivered to
her house that said, ‘Happy birthday, Mary,’ with ‘Mary’ crossed out and ‘Joan’ written in—and with a piece taken out of the cake.”
Every Sunday they had dinner together, often after attending a matinee. “One night I walked into Sarabeth’s on Central Park South and everyone turned around to look at me,” Stern recalled. “Joan stood up and said, ‘Ruthie—over here.’ She had told the waiter—in a very loud voice—‘When Ruth Madoff comes in, don’t talk to her about the case, because she’s very embarrassed.’”
Bernie Madoff’s financial misdeeds were dominating the news at the time, and everyone in the room thought the chic blond Stern was his wife. All the other customers spent the entire evening glaring at her.
When they ate together, the two women always split one order between them. “We had the exact same thing all the time, and we shared everything,” Stern said. “At Joe Allen, we had one salad with cheese and ham, and she would have the cheese and ham wrapped up. We had one banana cream pie. At Sarabeth we had an egg white omelet with tomatoes and mushrooms and a side order of spinach with extra garlic. We would get extra biscuits and cookies, and she would take them home—‘for the dogs,’ but I think she ate them. We had the same wine, Pinot Noir.”
Every year they went to the gift show at the Javits Center. “We would buy soap, candles, jewelry—everything in sight. We always had the best time,” Stern said. “Two years ago I broke my hip a week before the gift show, and she said, ‘I’ll push you in a wheelchair. But if I find out you had your face done instead of breaking your hip, I’m going to fucking kill you.’ So I got bandages and wrapped my whole head up. I opened the door—and there’s Joan limping in with a walker. I was so excited that we were going to get her—and this was a total ‘Gotcha!’ She one-upped me by walking in all bent over. I was so hysterical I thought I was going to fall and break the other hip. It was always the one-upmanship—except how could you one-up Joan Rivers?”
Last Girl Before Freeway Page 38