By ANDREA HIGBIE
So, what'll it be, President Obama's State of the Union Message or Joan Rivers's new reality show? The President may be historic, sure, but Rivers is a legend. And what becomes a legend most? Telling Howard Stern that while "we used to have Jackie O, now we have Blackie O."
(Oh, relax! It's a compliment.)
The reason Rivers was talking to Stern in the first place was that she stopped by his Sirius XM radio show in New York on Friday to promote her show, "Joan and Melissa: Joan Knows Best?," with its premiere episode, "Joan Moves In" (think it's about somebody named Joan?), on WE last night at 9 ET.
Rivers, who is 77, has been in full-promotion frenzy for her latest effort, on "Late Show With David Letterman" complaining that Betty White's come "back from the dead, and taking all my jobs."
"I almost got the Depends commercial," Rivers said. "I stood there and urinated. She got it."
Rivers was scheduled to appear on "Fox and Friends." But then she insulted Sarah Palin.
Two weekends ago, when a TMZ cameraman asked Rivers for her opinion on Palin, she said Palin was "stupid." Before summing Palin up as stupid, Rivers said: "I think Sarah Palin is an amazing woman. I think she represents everything strong a woman can be, and I think she should go someplace, to another planet, to show them, and get out of our face."
"Fox and Friends" interview: Canceled. It later claimed a scheduling mistake.
Rivers and Fox have a troubled history. In 1986, the new Fox Television Network gave Rivers a late night talk show, "The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers," to be broadcast weeknights, from 11 p.m. to midnight ET, putting her in direct competition with Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" at NBC.
Rivers had been Johnny Carson's permanent guest host on the "Tonight Show" at NBC, and she viewed him as a mentor. Carson never forgave her for leaving. He learned about Rivers's new show from Fox, he said, and he never spoke to her again.
Fox ended up canceling Rivers's show after seven months. Edgar Rosenberg, Joan's husband and Melissa's father, was the show's producer. He committed suicide in 1987, which Rivers blames Fox for.
So began another dark period for Rivers, but, like Rasputin, she rose again and rose even higher, with myriad club appearances, books, comedy albums, theater engagements, the red carpet gigs, talk shows here and there, QVC jewelry lines and "Great Hair," a product for women losing theirs.
The award-winning documentary "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work" was heralded at the Sundance Film Festival last January, and Rivers has won praise for her new Friday night E! show, "Fashion Police," where she and "my darling, Kelly Osbourne" and others dress down celebrities.
But it's never enough, not to calm the anxiety, over money, over her career. Rivers would be the first to say she'd go to the opening of an envelope, and she knows she doesn't have to run as fast as she does. Or even run at all.
She behaves as if it all -- the money, the success, everything -- could be snatched away in a heartbeat. And it has. Over and over.
The comedian's father, Meyer Molinsky, a physician, grew up poverty-stricken in Russia, in Odessa, not far geographically from her mother, Beatrice Grushman, but a world apart, as she was born in Imperial Russia to a wealthy family, then left impoverished with the Russian Revolution. Beatrice spent the rest of her life haunted by this.
In the shadow of the Depression, Joan Alexandra Molinksy, born in 1933, and her elder sister, Barbara, who became a lawyer, grew up in Brooklyn and, later, in the more rarified Larchmont, in Westchester County. Her mother continuously pushed her father to succeed, and there were raging fights. "My mother wanted M.D. to stand for Make Dollars," Joan said in early comedy routines.
While Rivers has announced that she is retiring from her focus on fashion to do the reality series, the word "retiring" has never been heard in connection with the name Joan Rivers, and probably never will. She doesn't stop.
Good for us. "Joan and Melissa: Joan Knows Best?" is good for what it is, and better than most of what's out there. It's got Joan Rivers, and that's the true treat.
Rivers has segued from her lifelong repertory of "I'm ugly" jokes to her "I'm ugly, and old" jokes. "My vagina is like Newark," she says. "Men know it's there, but they don't want to visit." Like Phyllis Diller, her contemporary in the 1960's comedy world, Rivers learned that female comics had to play up the ugly and downplay the pretty to be accepted.
If anything, Rivers is more glamorous today than she has ever been. Her clothing is fabulous. She's been a longtime client of Steven Hoefflin, the Santa Monica surgeon, coming ahead of his other famous client, Michael Jackson, by a nose.
Her plastic surgeries all began with an eye lift, in 1965, to enhance her stage appearance.
The surgeries would have continued into last night's show, but for three surgeon's turning down her requests to trim her upper arms, which continue waving long after she's stopped. The surgeons tell her this surgery is unnecessary (an unlikely scenario). She plans to find someone who will do what she wants, despite what Melissa tells her.
"I don't like you having all that plastic surgery," Melissa says -- take her knife, please! -- with the tone of a parent telling her chubby child to take it easy on the cookies.
"It's my face, my body, my money," Joan counters, with the tone of one who has already won.
Aside from the control issues, the premiere focuses on secrets.
Melissa, who is 43 and divorced, doesn't want her mother to know that her boyfriend, Jason, a financial manager, has moved in. He's living there -- Joan strongly suspects -- with Melissa, Cooper, Melissa's friend Conrad, and the sexy nanny, Dominica, who is a major source of annoyance to Joan.
"Are you fucking crazy?" Joan says to Melissa. "You get an ugly nanny. Or a gay guy. Or an ugly gay guy." Joan tells Melissa that the nannies she hired had harelips and that zoos tried to buy them.
To Joan, the nanny issue is bad enough, but it's the living arrangement and the fact that Melissa has said nothing about it to her that is upsetting. She tells a friend about it. "What do you care?" Joan's friend admonishes her in a phone call from New York. "You're a guest there."
After an afternoon at the beach, where the nanny casually takes off her bikini top and asks a truly disgusted Joan to rub sunblock on her back, Joan buys Cooper a surfboard, and instructs him: "Your mother is not to know."
It's all taking a toll, and by dinner, Joan can barely restrain herself.
Melissa, to Joan's disapproval, ordered Chinese food. "You ordered Chinese?" Joan demands.
"Why are you ordering out? She" -- the nanny -- "should be making you food. She's been laying on the beach all day long."
At dinner, which Joan insists should be served in the dining room -- not in the kitchen, Melissa asks Cooper what he did at the beach. "It's a secret," he told her.
"You know my rule," Melissa said to him. "There are no secrets between us.
"There are no secrets between mommies and sons."
Joan can finally take no more. "There are secrets between mommies and daughters."
Then the not-so-secret secret about Jason came out, everyone looking abashed, but Joan.
She tells the camera: "I accepted the Chinese dinner. I put the Chinese food in the cartons with my silver. But then, when Melissa was giving Cooper a lecture about secrets...."
Joan announces to the table: "I would like to see a ring on your finger, Melissa. You don't have a father, and someone has to turn to Jason and say, 'What are your intentions?' "
"I just want you to know," Joan says to him. "You'll be watched."
And so will she. I'll catch the State of the Union Message later.
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Comments
I always liked her even though I've always wanted to use her cheeks as a trampoline.
Now that SHE'S gotten old, she automatically associates age as ugly and sexless.
JR is rich, famous and looks terrific (hell, she's 77, folks! I wish I could buy my beauty like she can!). She could skewer the young, rich and trashy in a heartbeat and leave 'em in the dust w/her quick wit. Too bad she either can't or won't.