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Joan Rivers's daughter: I scattered mum's ashes at The Ritz
In the three years since Joan Rivers died, her daughter Melissa has been travelling the world scattering her mother’s ashes in key places. “She’s now in Paris, Mexico and Wyoming,” explains the 48-year-old author and producer, sitting in her ocean view, Los Angeles home, surrounded by photos of her mother.
“She’s all over New York and obviously here in LA, and I’m taking her to Venice. I really, really need to get her to Highgrove, so I’m going to ask Prince Charles if he’ll do it for me. Do you think it would be odd to write and say: ‘Could I send you a little bit of mama?’ Well, anyway, I’m going to do it.”
The legendary Brooklyn-born actress and comedian – who died in 2014 from complications after throat surgery – “is in London, too”, Rivers assures me. “I’ve scattered her ashes in the lobby of The Ritz, in the Wolseley and a little bit in Harry’s Bar.”
Did Rivers check with management before doing this? “No – I just had these little baggies…” she goes on, miming the removal of one of these from her handbag and a bit of surreptitious sprinkling.
But what if they hoovered after? “Well, honey, if they haven’t hoovered, those restaurants have a bigger problem than my mum’s ashes all over their floor.”
In her wit, her eyes and her delivery, Rivers is uncannily like her mother. Little wonder, when you consider how close the two women were: how they grieved the loss of Melissa’s father, Edgar Rosenberg, together when Joan’s husband of 22 years committed suicide in 1987, ripped apart celebrities’ red-carpet dresses together on their Fashion Police TV show, took mutual joy in Melissa’s son, Cooper, and shared a lifetime of laughter right up until Joan’s death.
“Even now,” Rivers points out, “it’s not like her voice is ever not there. People say to me: ‘Do you hear your mum in your head?’ And I’m thinking: ‘Probably more than I want to.’ Just this morning she was there shouting: ‘F--- ’em!’”
The truth is that Rivers has been doing all she can to keep her mother’s voice as loud and brash as ever. To that end, she is publishing Joan Rivers Confidential, a coffee table-style “scrapbook” in which she has assembled many of the funniest monologues, letters and never-before-heard jokes (some scribbled on airplane boarding passes) that her mother amassed over the years.
“I want it to commemorate a woman who stayed so relevant and skewered every one of the sacred cows, not in order to make a point but simply because she wanted to be funny.”
Joan Rivers Confidential reminds you just how outrageously funny her mother was, from her “Mafia school” maths class skits (“Johnny has ten fingers and they cut off two, how many does he have left?”) and her desperate single years jokes (“I send peeping toms change-of-address cards”) to the indignities of pregnancy (“Whoever said pregnant women are beautiful never saw one trying to get off the sofa”).
“It’s a very British humour, isn’t it?” says Rivers with a smile. “And I think that’s why she and Charles and Camilla became friends – because those two have a great sense of humour. She was one of only four Americans invited to their wedding.”
It’s clear from the tone of her mother’s correspondence with the Prince of Wales – some of which is featured in the book – how genuine that unlikely friendship was. “There was an old British aristocrat I won’t name who had had a little ‘leaky’ mishap during a New York dinner party, and my mother told Charles and Camilla about it right before a receiving line in London. Only she refused to tell them who it was, so the whole night Charles and Camilla kept pointing at people and mouthing: ‘Is it…?’ Apparently, it got so bad that the three of them couldn’t stop giggling.”
Despite being the first woman ever to host a late-night talk show and a pioneering presence in print, on stage and on TV, an essay in the book – penned for Playboy in the early 1960s, entitled “Dear Women’s Lib” – highlights Rivers’s ambivalence on the subject: “I’m for a whole lot of things that women’s lib stands for. But girls, ladies, please start the revolution without me. I’ll be along a little later. I have to make Edgar dinner first.”
“She became such a feminist icon,” her daughter tells me, “but mum never thought of herself as a feminist. To her, feminists were women who didn’t want the door opened for them, but mum would say: ‘I still want the door opened for me, I still want the man to pick up the check, and I still want to get flowers.’
"The idea of feminism was a bit foreign to her because she never thought of herself as being held back in any way. She just knew she had to be funnier and better than anybody else.”
Perhaps the biggest revelation in the book is that the woman so quick to skewer she became known as the “comic stiletto” hated to upset people. “Mum was never out to hurt anyone, and actually very few people got angry. Even Elizabeth Taylor loved her… in the end.” Poor Taylor has several pages devoted to her – and her girth – in the book: “Liz has a bumper sticker that says ‘Save the Whales’ and in small print ‘for appetizers’”, “Liz is the only person I know who looks at a picture of the Last Supper and asks ‘Who got the leftovers?’”
“Of course, now it would be seen as ‘fat-shaming’, but Liz knew she was overweight,” laughs Rivers, “and when they did finally meet, they were friendly from then on.”
Towards the end of her life, Joan Rivers was finding PC censorship “very, very frustrating”, her daughter tells me. “And, of course, you have to know where the line is. When one of our politicians came out and imitated a handicapped person… that’s not funny. And, anyway, he’s not a comedian.”
Ah, yes: I was going to ask about Donald Trump. He and her mother became friendly after she won Celebrity Apprentice in 2009, but could she ever have imagined he’d become president? “Honestly, I think she’d be so torn between being invited to the White House and being able to steal things, which she loved to do – whether it was pocketing an ashtray or some pens – and what she felt was morally right. That would have been Sophie’s Choice for my mother.”
But would she have voted for Trump? “I think she would have wanted someone who didn’t have to prove he had the biggest one in the room.”
That old-boy’s club culture of intimidation has been blown wide open here in LA in recent weeks, and although neither Rivers nor her mother knew Harvey Weinstein, well, Joan – who started acting in her teens – had warned her daughter about the casting couch. “There were a few times when she had felt extremely uncomfortable with men and didn’t want to be alone with them. ‘Most powerful men are pigs,’ she told me, ‘and it sucks and it’s wrong and you don’t have to take it, but be aware that it happens.'
“Sadly, this is a tale that’s as old as time, and really no different to Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner chasing women around the desk. But mum would have been appalled that this had been going on for so long without anybody saying athing. She would also have had a whole filing cabinet dedicated to Harvey Weinstein jokes by now.”
In the space of a few seconds, Rivers’s expression has gone from sadness to anger and frustration. “The first year without mum was a blur, the second was when I realised it was real, and now I do just feel this bitter-sweet frustration: why are you not here to make jokes about my son as a teenager and Trump and Harvey? Because, by the way, she would be in heaven right now. Heaven.”