Her favorite books: “Helter Skelter” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” Her fourth-grade teacher at the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School noted in a report card that Joan (then Joan Molinsky) was “learning to be self-reliant and gain recognition through accomplishment rather than through complaining,” adding, “She is fast overcoming her tendency toward bribery in order to win friends.”
And in case you were wondering: Joan “changed her own physical appearance” more than 300 times — 365 to be specific, according to her daughter. “The running joke,” she writes, was that her own grandson used to call Rivers “Nana New Face.” Still, Melissa insists, “She didn’t have as much work as people think she had.” (What does she think we’ve been thinking?)
Rivers’s breezy book is full of filler — Joan’s dating tips (“Never pick up the check;” “Never carry condoms”), Mother’s Day gift dos and don’ts (“never, ever, ever … give your mother a vacuum”) and the like. The book is less a biography than a series of vignettes, some of which read like Joan Rivers sketches: “Right up until the end of her life my mother believed that, in a pinch, ketchup, Altoids, and Milk Duds were a three-course meal. That doesn’t mean we didn’t sit down to dinner together every night. We did. And my parents would start a meal by thanking God not only for the abundance of food but for the abundance of restaurants offering delivery within 30 minutes.”
All joking aside, Melissa, who starred with her mother on “Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?” and is the executive producer for E! Entertainment’s “Fashion Police,” clearly has a genuine affection and respect for her mother, and losing her has been difficult. “I’m lost as a performer right now,” she writes, “but I will find my own voice. I was taught by the best.”