Diary of a Mad Diva (15 page)

AUGUST 10

Dear Diary:

Today was our last day of Grandma Week and Cooper wanted to go whitewater rafting down the Colorado River. I’d have been much happier sitting in the Four Seasons watching
Deliverance
on Netflix, but whatever, it’s his vacation.

Turns out the rafting trip was great—we got soaked and bumped and bruised but Cooper had a blast; and even though I’m a little battered from the rough waters and the rocks, I know I have a nice insurance claim and negligence lawsuit to file when I get home. Another win-win!

FYI: If I have to hear one more story about how brave the Western pioneers were . . . how they had to get their rafts across the crocodile-filled swirling rapids; how they had to figure out which snakes were poisonous and which ones would make lovely handbags; blah, blah, blah. You want a pioneer? Helena Rubinstein: she invented hypoallergenic, waterproof foundation and cover-sticks, so all of those Brokeback Mountain cowboys could “pioneer” each other in the back of a tent without having to worry about blackheads or combination skin.

AUGUST 12

Dear Diary:

I’m a reader. Often I’ll read an entire book cover to cover in one sitting in the bathroom, which really annoys the other passengers on a plane, but as Count Vronsky said when Anna Karenina begged him not to leave her, “Too fucking bad.” Apparently word of my voracious reading habits got out, and so yesterday I did an interview about my last book,
I Hate Everyone . . . Starting with Me
. I was asked who my favorite and least favorite authors are. For my favorite I said Ann Rule, the great true crime writer, even though Edith Wharton was a close second. Both are so similar. In Wharton I can watch rich society people suffer, but Rule wins because I can watch trailer trash not only suffer but get brutally murdered, sometimes hacked up or left totally unrecognizable when they’re fished out of a marsh.

Both are great, cozy, good bedtime reading after a difficult day.

Again, when it came to naming my least favorite author, I had to say, “I have two!” Charles Dickens and little Anne Frank. Let’s start with Dickens. What a bore. Charlie could spend eight pages describing a street in London. His novel
David Copperfield
is 1,016 pages—and no pictures! And as for Anne Frank, go back to the January 4 entry.

AUGUST 13

Dear Diary:

This is why I hate L.A. I saw a $400,000 chauffeur-driven Bentley in front of a Supercuts. I didn’t even know Phil Spector was out on bail.

I am very careful about where I go to get my hair cut in Beverly Hills. I only go to regular hair salons because if you go where stars go you might catch something. I’m not saying she’s dirty, but I heard that when they cut Helena Bonham Carter’s hair, it made three rats homeless.

AUGUST 14

Dear Diary:

Flew back to New York last night. Didn’t need an Ambien, a glass of wine or a seat next to an actuary to fall asleep. The movie on board was
All Is Lost
with Robert Redford. Other than seagulls cooing and waves splashing—and my snoring—it was basically a silent movie. Eight minutes in I was hoping the boat would capsize and Big Red would get eaten by a school of sharks that don’t mind moles or bad plastic surgery.
*
The only thing worse would have been if Bobby were trying to pass time on the boat by reading a Dickens novel out loud.

AUGUST 16

Dear Diary:

Today is Madonna’s birthday. Now I know why they refer to August as “the dog days of summer.” I wasn’t sure what to buy her, but I finally settled on
Fifty Shades of Grey
for her so she can read it, and a box of crayons so her boyfriend can color it in.

AUGUST 17

Dear Diary:

I can’t stand people who don’t pick up after their dogs. It’s filthy, it’s disgusting and it’s unsanitary. It makes the sidewalks unsleepable for the homeless, and even worse, it forces me to wear high heels on occasions that desperately call for flats.

I
always
pick up after my dogs. Well, actually
I
,
Joan Rivers, diva-philanthropist of a sort, amazingly sexual for her age,
don’t pick up my dog’s poo. I have my staff do it. In this case it’s Pingpong’s second cousin, Kabuki, who’s here on a temporary visa or maybe it’s an amnesty application having something to do with ivory hunting or sex trafficking. I don’t know; after seeing
Downton Abbey
I make it my business not to get into backstairs gossip.

Kabuki is a lovely young Pygmy man. He has to jump up in order to hand me my mail, but I find him totally trustworthy. Not once in all the time he’s been scooping the poop has he ever brought one of my dogs to a Korean restaurant and “accidentally” left him in the kitchen.

AUGUST 18

Dear Diary:

Back in L.A. Everyone is just starting to calm down. There was an earthquake here last night. Very scary! Everything started to shake. Only two people were happy about the quake: Michael J. Fox, as it was the first time in years he walked straight; and me. Now that my vagina has dropped so low, I just suctioned it to the floor of my bedroom and was perfectly safe. Never thought I would say this, but hooray for age.

AUGUST 19

Dear Diary:

Performed at a women’s show and it went surprisingly well. Lena Dunham spoke about how difficult it is to be a woman in our business and claims she, and she alone, has broken through for women. In the audience Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Mary Tyler Moore and Sarah Jessica Parker all started to cry because according to that fatso, they didn’t count. I do want to give her credit however—Lena was the first fat girl naked on television and she changed the way America looks at their TV sets. They now do it with their hands over their eyes.

AUGUST 20

Dear Diary:

I have to send a gift to the Royal Family. I totally missed Prince William and Princess Kate’s son George’s birthday. Little Georgie has William’s full lips and Kate’s sparkling eyes. I hope he doesn’t have Diana’s sense of direction. It’s very hard to buy a gift for the future king of England. What do you get someone who already owns Scotland? I went into a store to buy him a set of blocks and they said, “He’s already got Trafalgar Square and Regent Street.”

Our
royal family—the Obamas, not the Kardashians—welcomed a new addition into their family, too. No, Sasha’s not pregnant—but wouldn’t it be fabulous if she were? She could be the first Baby Mama on Obama-care. President Obama has gotten a new dog. I could tell right away he was Obama’s dog: he was cute and black, and when he barked, no foreigners listened.

AUGUST 21

Dear Diary:

Just got to San Francisco for a concert. Should be fun, it’ll be my crowd: fifteen thousand gay guys and the fat gal pals they dance with.

San Francisco is
still
the gayest city in the country, hands down—or bottoms up, depending on who took the poppers! This city is so gay that at the bar in my hotel the specialty drink is the AIDS cocktail.

AUGUST 22

Dear Diary:

Oy. On the way to my show tonight we got stuck on a bridge behind a car with handicap plates.

What is the driver’s handicap? Does he have only one leg and therefore can’t brake? Or tiny little dwarf hands and can’t turn the wheel? Maybe he’s got Tourette’s and every time he—shitfuck, shitfuck, shitfuck—twitches, the car keeps switching lanes? Does he have to stop and scratch while going seventy miles per hour because he has the heartbreak of psoriasis? Is he deaf? Because I remember when driving with Helen Keller the guy driving behind us kept honking his horn. He figured out it was a complete waste of time when he hit the ditch.

I think handicap plates should be more specific. Right now all they have is a drawing of a wheelchair. I think if the driver is blind, the plate should have a picture of Stevie Wonder; and if he’s retarded, a picture of Sarah Palin; and if it’s an underage driver, a picture of R. Kelly with a line through it.

I was getting agitated when I noticed the driver also had a bumper sticker that read, “I’d rather be fishing.” So I hit him in the rear and knocked him off the bridge into the water. I got to my gig in Sausalito and he got a guppy on his way to God. Win-win!

AUGUST 23

Dear Diary:

My concert went really well; God bless the San Fran homos! If she’s still alive, I’ll bet Anita Bryant is sorry she dissed them. At the end of the show, all fifteen thousand party bottoms stood up and gave me a farting ovation.

AUGUST 25

Dear Diary:

I may be changing agents even though I love Suave Steve Levine. I think of agents the way I think of a pair of old Spanx: (1) They’re not as bright as when you first got them; (2) they sure don’t support you the way they did in the beginning; and (3) after a couple of months they really start to smell. I think the real reason I’m leaving is because I hate my agent’s new assistant, Helmut. He’s a little snot that prides himself on his candor and frankness. Honestly, I don’t want candor and frankness from a twelve-year-old with rich parents and hair gel. I don’t need, right before I go on, him whispering in my ear, “Fingers crossed you still remember your act, Miss Rivers,” or, “Know why I like you? You make my nana look hot!” I want someone who will be kissing my ass so much they’ll have to travel with a suitcase filled with Blistex. Never mind a good-looking kid from a rich family; I want a delusional adult with low self-esteem and people-pleasing issues. I want to hear, “Oh, Miss Rivers, you are so much more beautiful and thin in person!” rather than, “Gee, even in clothes your body looks like it’s melting.”

AUGUST 26

Dear Diary:

Chilling at Melissa’s house after spending all day tending to business. While watching Congress on C-SPAN tonight, I had a revelation. (I don’t normally watch C-SPAN but my remote froze while I was changing channels trying to find
Animal Horror Stories
and
Pets Who Kill
.) The revelation is this: When a member of Congress refers to another member as “my distinguished colleague,” what he means is “that dim-witted asshole,” and when he says “with all due respect,” he means, “fuck you and the lobbyist you rode in on.” I love America.

AUGUST 27

Dear Diary:

I took Cooper to SeaWorld in San Diego today. We went swimming with the dolphins. I love dolphins. They’re smart and they’re beautiful, but what nobody talks about is that they shit in the water. As Elie Wiesel likes to say, “Never again.”

AUGUST 28

Dear Diary:

The Elie Wiesel quote got me thinking. As Hitler’s niece, Bertha von Schnitzel, once told me, “It’s very hard to cheer up Holocaust victims. Joan, no matter how many times I’m in their company and no matter how hard I try, I just can’t put a positive spin on their experiences. What can you say?” And she’s right, what
can
you say to Buchenwald Betty and Auschwitz Arnie?

• “Hey, could be worse. At least you got three hots and a cot!”
  
• “Look how easy it was to keep your weight down! I’ll bet not one person in the camps ever came up to you and said, ‘Ruthie, you look a little hippy. Lay off the dirt soup.’”
  
• “Don’t be a whiner—you can finally pull off horizontal stripes!”
  
• “So they put you on a train in the middle of the night and moved you out of your house. What’s so bad? No one likes to summer where they winter!”
  

AUGUST 29

Dear Diary:

Went to a big Hollywood party tonight and guess who snubbed me? Gayle King. That’s right, Gayle King. With all due respect, I spent all night chatting with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, but
Gayle King
ignored me??? Maybe she’s mad at me because I’m always making jokes about her friendship with Oprah, or maybe it’s because when I saw her at the party I said, “Gayle, I love your chunky silver bracelet. Are you wearing a matching cock ring?” Whatever. I still consider her a distinguished colleague.

AUGUST 30

Dear Diary:

I took Cooper to the Dodgers’ game tonight. He had a great time. The Dodgers’ pitcher was a Korean rookie named Hyun-Jin Ryu, so the stands were packed with Korean fans. I felt like an extra on
The Bridge on the River Kwai
.
*
The Dodgers won and Ryu was terrific. The only bad thing was when we went to the food court, the famous Dodger Dogs still had their tails.

AUGUST 31

Dear Diary:

I’m on the plane flying home. It’s the last day of August, which means it’s safe to be in New York because all the shrinks are back from the Hamptons and the crazies are back in therapy. But just my luck, I’m seated next to Gary Busey and Charlie Sheen. I’m praying the movie is
All Is Lost
.