[ad_1]
Joan Rivers is with her daughter Melissa every day. Still.
She’s in the 76,000 index cards — each with a typed joke — that she left behind. She’s there every time Melissa sits at home in sweats and the voice of Joan reminds her: “A little lip gloss never hurt anybody.”
“Even from the afterlife, she tells me what to do,” Melissa said of her famous mom, who passed away in 2014. “The thing is, with my mother’s voice, I spend most of my time running trying to get away from that squawk — because, let me tell you, it is in my head all the time.
“People are always like ‘Do you hear her voice?’ Unfortunately, too much!”
On the weekend of the Oscars, as with every awards show, Melissa — who Melissa has a new book, “Lies My Mother Told Me,” out April 12 — was bombarded by friends and fans asking: “WWJD?” (What Would Joan Do?) After all, the legendary comedian hosted used to work the red carpet with a microphone and barbs at the ready, and hosted E!’s fabulously snarky “Fashion Police” with her daughter for years.
“I kept getting tagged all over Instagram — people saying, ‘Where was she for this!?’” Melissa, 54, said of the moments after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage.
She noted that she saw someone on social media ask: “And people wonder how Harvey Weinstein got away with it for all those years?” That was a perfect example of how Harvey got away with it. Nobody did anything!”
Joan, however, always called out bad behavior — as well as narcissism, egotism, hypocrisy and questionable style choices.
She was often slammed for her acid-tongue comments on “Fashion Police,” saying of Angelina Jolie at the 2012 Oscars: “Everyone took her to task with that photograph with the leg out, but to me it looked as if she had a terrible yeast infection and she was trying to air it out. It was hilarious!” Of Justin Bieber’s attire, Joan once said: “Someone needs to sit him down and say, ‘You are not a big black thug.’”
“People always say ‘Well, did people get mad at you?’” Melissa admitted. “And we’d be like ‘Yeah, but it’s ridiculous because we’re talking about, first of all, clothing, not about the person.’ And all these women, and now men, most of them now get paid for what they’re wearing, which is a whole other topic.
“But that we don’t like one of the $15,000 gowns of the 10 that you wore through award season? And you’re making $20 million a year? Really? Have we all gotten so serious that we can’t laugh at ourselves and understand how lucky we all are and be able to take a joke about a dress when you had hundreds of thousands of dollars of clothes given to you?
In this current woke climate, it’s easy to wonder if Joan would have been “cancelled”, but Melissa doesn’t think so. “I like to think that she would’ve been sort of grandfathered in and given a path like Dave Chappelle,” she said.
She believes her mom would look at the sensitivity two ways.
“She always used to say ‘Funny is funny.’ So I think she would be very happy with the fact that people were coming around, in the sense of allowing people their opportunities, regardless of race, skin color, sexual identity — that people were finally forcing the industry’s hand to open those floodgates,” Melissa explained. “because her opinion was that it didn’t matter who it came from.”
However, Melissa added: “Would she have thought that the pendulum had swung too far in the whole PC-slash-cancel culture? One hundred percent Her whole thing was, ‘Life is hard enough.’ Everyone needs to take a deep breath, realize that this world that we live in is insane, and let’s have a good life.
“She always used to say,’ Making someone laugh is like giving them a mini vacation,’ and I think she would’ve been very distraught about there being this policing of allowing people to have humor and laugh — the world is f—ed up enough.”
Growing up, the one thing banned by Joan and her husband, Melissa’s father Edgar Rosenberg, was “willful ignorance”, Melissa added.
From her days performing stand up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s — alongside friends including Richard Pryor, Woody Allen and George Carlin — Joan broke ground as the first female “Tonight Show” regular, making her debut with Johnny Carson in February 1965. She was Carson’s permanent guest host until their famous fallout when she was named the first woman to host a late night talk show, on Fox, in October 1986.
Her humor was bawdy, and — although Melissa doesn’t talk about Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs Maisel,” which she once said was clearly inspired by her mom — she is currently “entertaining offers” from producers who want to put Joan’s life on screen.
“My mother always said she wanted Cate Blanchett to play her, so yeah that would be my first choice, because they’re so similar,” Melissa said sarcastically, laughing, of her five-foot-two mom. “My mother was tall, blonde, WASPy and swan-like, so clearly, one can draw the line.”
Melissa said that although Joan was a “groundbreaking feminist,” her family called her the “accidental feminist.”
“She never was actively like, ‘I’m burning my bra.’ She just put her head down and did her work. I can only remember a few times in my life where she would say it would’ve been so much easier to be a man, but her goal wasn’t to be the funniest female comic — her goal was to be the best comic,” Melissa said.
Joan, then 81, in September 2014, days after undergoing a routine endoscopy at a New York City clinic. In May 2016, Melissa settled a medical malpractice lawsuit against the facility — having alleged that doctors performed unauthorized medical procedures, snapped a selfie with the comedian while she was unconscious and failed to act as her vital signs deteriorated.
“She would’ve been annoyed that it wasn’t plastic surgery. That’s what would’ve really annoyed her, that it was for her throat and acid reflux. Not very glamorous,” Melissa joked of Joan’s passing.
“Humor absolutely saved me,” Melissa told The Post. “I think everybody expected me to just fall to pieces and unravel. Even some of our friends were like ‘We can’t believe that you didn’t completely fall apart.’ I’m like ‘Have you known me my whole life?’
“I’m from the stock where, you get up in the morning, you put your big girl panties on and you put one foot in front of the other, and that’s how I got through my father’s suicide.” (Rosenberg overdosed from prescription drugs, at age 61, in 1987.)
Melissa had to be strong for her son Cooper Endicott, Joan’s beloved grandson, who’s now age 21 and a junior at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s majoring in media studios, with an emphasis on new media, and wants to get into the entertainment behind the scenes.
“Cooper was my priority,” Melissa said. “He looked at me after [Joan’s death] and said, ‘Nothing will ever be good again.’ He verbalized how I was feeling in that moment. But I had to say, ‘You’re wrong. Nothing will ever be the same again, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be amazing.’
“And then I went in my room and unraveled, because I felt like he was right and I couldn’t stand seeing my son in so much pain.”
Now, Melissa has a podcast, “Group Text,” on Apple, where she shares her thoughts on whatever she and her friends are texting about: from fashion on the red carpet to the annoying number of “reboots” to being an empty nester. She is also in talks for new TV projects.
Remembering her mom makes her smile. She’s still finding jokes written on bits of paper among Joan’s things.
“One of the most alarming things, and this is not in the book — it always makes me laugh, though. One time, my mother looked at me and said, ‘God, you’re so much of a better parent than I ever was.’ I’m like, Well that’s encouraging. I think that’s maybe something you should keep to yourself.”
Photos: John Chapple; Hair: Adrian Castillo; Makeup: Sarah Maxwell; Location: Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel, LA.
[ad_2]