The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief and Manipulation
by Melissa Rivers
Great comedians are great moralists. They point out and mock our flaws, errors, imperfections – our silliness and superciliousness.
Joan Rivers was a particularly hysterical scourge of human pompousness and hypocrisy and little escaped her derision.
I loved Joan. She’d developed a style that was simultaneously elegant and coarse, and lofty and tacky, with which she entertained and harangued audiences for 50 years.
‘The woman was indefatigable,’ says her only child, Melissa, in this admiring memoir. Not a moment was ever wasted. Always pushy, in the post-war period Joan was to have had the job of marshalling people into the neighbourhood bomb shelter in the event of a nuclear attack.
Melissa admits that, researching this book, she had a hard time determining her mother’s early career, as much of it was embellished. For example, Joan didn’t star in any Hitchcock films, as she once stated.
Euphemisms appalled Joan, but in recent times the foe was political correctness. A “radical feminist”, according to Joan, simply meant “single woman”. A homosexual was any male who mentioned Bette Midler more than once in any calendar year.
For all her outspokenness, Joan was very much conditioned by the mores of her middle-class background. Things like sending bouquets of flowers and prompt thank-you notes mattered.
She was raised never to leave the house without being dressed in gloves, a fur coat and a hat. “Men should be gentle-men and women should be ladies and drag queens should make up their mind.”
Her attitudes and assumptions about womenwere very much fixed in the ‘50s and ’60s, when it was the duty of a good girl to look alluring and trap her lord and master, ie her provider. “I need a man to spoil me, or I don’t need a man at all,” she chirruped. “Men are basic. They want you to look pretty and be good in bed. No man ever wants to be reminded that women are truly superior.” The philosophy is pure Barbara Cartland, who also maintained that a woman’s destiny is to be a decorative geisha.
Joan was still laying down the law when she died last September at the age of 81 – during a throat procedure that went wrong and left her in a coma. Melissa was with her when they switched off the ventilator.
Behind such views and jokes lay a pathological insecurity about her own physical appearance and attractiveness — hence the 300-odd cosmetic surgery procedures that made this woman into such a grotesque, ravaged Hammer Horror screaming skull.
Joan was a defiant diva, who made so many jokes about her own coffin-dodging, she’ll have been as shocked as anyone when she became literally demised.
Daily Mail