When Joan Rivers showed up at Barnes & Noble in New York's Union Square to sign copies of her new book, Diary of a Mad Diva, at the end June, I was lucky enough to go.
My mum was visiting from England for a few days and we couldn't quite believe the timing - the opportunity to see Joan in the “flesh” (she’d want me to say it) was one 16 years in the making. Yes, she had a decades-long career before the often horrific sartorial choices that epitomized her turn-of-the-century red carpet beat and she had one after, but E! is where we first encountered her.
When my family and I arrived in Illinois from Swindon, U.K. on the last day of 1998, Joan Rivers and her acerbic comments, made directly to the faces of America's most beautiful people, was one of our first and most important introductions to American popular culture. Year after year during that Midwestern adventure, in the living room of our airy suburban house in a neighborhood without streetlights or sidewalks, my mum, sister and I huddled round our television during the winter freeze and tried to make sense of the annual spate of award ceremonies.
In England, we were always asleep by the time the shows were broadcast from the entirely foreign and golden planet of Los Angeles. To my eight-year-old self, being able to watch the Emmys, the Golden Globes and especially the Oscars live, in real time, was a luxury and Rivers was the ultimate bad-ass. There was nothing better than watching her stand there and make people sweat, knowing it was her job to do it.
I discovered her first on the red carpet sidelines. Thanks to YouTube and Netflix, I later found her stand-up and the documentary A Piece of Work, an incredible illustration in never giving up. She didn't care what people thought of her and to a pre-teen in a foreign country with a dodgy accent, it was electric. I will always be grateful to her for that.
After Joan was replaced on the E! red carpet, confined to a studio to fling her barbs from a distance at which they wouldn't sting her targets, she remained a constant cultural presence for me and my family, connecting us across an ocean. We watched her together on E!'s Fashion Police in hotel rooms across America, once or twice in foreign countries, and on TV in the living room during my visits home to the U.K.
The frantic, emoticon-filled text messages from my sister and a phone call from my mum (“The Times was advertising her shows on Sunday!” she said - Rivers was scheduled to tour the U.K. next month) within ten minutes of the news of her death breaking on Thursday was a testament to the place she occupied in my family.
Back to Barnes & Noble. She arrived a little late to a throng of New York’s finest eccentrics (at least five women and one man with small dogs resting in the netted comparents of their pushcarts) and tourists who wandered in unknowingly, all thrown together and coated in a layer of grime from a late June day in the city. She still knew how to draw a crowd.
Joan answered every question from the audience, who were both delighted and in utter awe of her. She gave out restaurant recommendations. She deflected two poorly-disguised PETA activists with nothing better to on a Monday night by saying, yes, I do own fur, and I understand where you're coming from, but it’s better than throwing those animals away.
Then a man stood up and asked Rivers if she could marry him and his boyfriend. An ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, she did just that. Even though the couple, Joe and William Ryan Aiello, didn’t yet have a marriage license, Joan borrowed a page boy from the audience, used the flowers from a woman's just-purchased hanging basket and performed the ceremony anyway. It showed her staggering kindness and three hours later, she was still there.
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